Republicans blasted Donald Trump for meeting with embattled rapper Kanye West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — with one saying he found the meeting “troubling” and another urging the ex-president to use better judgment when picking his dining companions.
“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that’s setting an example for the country or the party to meet with (an) avowed racist or anti-Semite. And so it’s very troubling and it shouldn’t happen and we need to avoid those kind of empowering the extremes,” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
“You want to diminish their strength, not empower them. Stay away from it,” said Hutchinson, who has said he’s mulling running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Trump, 76, announced a third bid for the White House earlier this month during an event at his Palm Beach resort.
The former president has acknowledged that he met with West, who goes by Ye, and Fuentes, who took part in the white supremacist marches in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and has remarked that the “math doesn’t seem to add up” for the 6 million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust.
Rep. James Comer — a Republican from Kentucky who is widely expected to head the House Oversight Committee when the House reconvenes in GOP control after the first of the year — was asked about the controversial Tuesday night meal on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“He certainly needs better judgment in who he dines with. I know that he’s issued a statement. He said he didn’t know who those people were,” Comer said of Trump.
Asked by host Chuck Todd if he would ever take a meeting with Fuentes, Comer replied, “I would not take a meeting with that person, though. I wouldn’t take a meeting with Kanye West either, but that’s, that’s my opinion.”
Hutchinson, who is term-limited in Arkansas, said he hopes not to have to respond to Trump’s antics in the future but said it is important to do so in this situation.
“The last time I met with a white supremacist, it was in an armed standoff. I had a bulletproof vest on. We arrested them, prosecuted them, sent them to prison. And so, no, I don’t think it’s a good idea for a leader that is setting an example for the country or the party to meet with an avowed racist or anti-Semite,” he said on CNN.
West, 45, has lost endorsements worth billions with Adidas, Vogue, Balenciaga and other companies after knocking “Jewish business people” and declaring he would go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”
Both he and Fuentes have been banned by Twitter and other social media platforms for their anti-Semitic rants.
Trump, in an emailed statement to The Post on Friday, said West has wanted to have dinner with him, but showed up at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday with Fuentes, whom Trump claimed he didn’t know.
But even as the 45th president tried to put distance between himself and the Holocaust denier, West released a video on Thursday saying “Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes.”
By Saturday, Trump was calling West a “seriously troubled man.”
“So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black Ye (Kanye West), who had been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who had always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice,’” Trump said on Truth Social.