Mitch McConnell (left), Donald Trump.Photo: Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Senate Minority LeaderMitch McConnelloffered a thinly veiled criticism ofDonald Trumpdays after the former president — who recentlylaunched his 2024 campaignfor the presidency — had a private dinner with rapperKanye Westand white supremacist Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Axioscites a source who said “there was a lot of fawning back and forth” between the former president and Fuentes, who made headlines in 2017 for attending the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and whose YouTube channel was permanently suspended for violating the company’s hate speech policy.
Days after the dinner was publicized, Trump issued a statement claiming he didn’t know who the Holocaust denier was — but he refrained from repudiating the white supremacist or his views.
“This past week,Kanye Westcalled me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform four days after the dinner. “We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”
McConnell’s remarks come after others in the Republican party also spoke out against the dinner — albeit, without going so far to say they wouldn’t vote for Trump in the future because of it.
“President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table,” former vice president Mike Pence said in a Monday appearance on NewsNation,Axiosreports. “I think he should apologize for it and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”
Pence added that he didn’t believe Trump himself is a “racist or a bigot,” but that he “demonstrated profoundly poor judgment in giving those individuals a seat at the table.”
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“You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” Trump said in 2017, days after the rally and counter-protests in which one woman died. “The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”
“You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he added.
source: people.com
