News Explodes That Donald Trump Ate Dinner With White Nationalist Nick Fuentes

Ask me how much I’d like to not be writing this piece right now. Yet, the news doesn’t stop just because I don’t like it, and the internet is now ablaze with confirmation that Donald Trump had dinner with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes showed up on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West (or Ye or whatever). As I shared in another recent piece, West put out a “debrief” describing his meeting with the former president, including an accusation that Trump badmouthed Kim Kardashian and praised Fuentes. Still, I was wishing that the reports of the white nationalist actually being there were false.

Unfortunately, they aren’t.

This source is wrong. Nick Fuentes in fact did have dinner with Trump and Kanye at Mar-a-Lago and spoke directly with the former president, per sources with direct knowledge. Story to come on @axios. https://t.co/1QK4j5WuQv

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) November 25, 2022

There are very few mainstream media reporters I take at their word, but Jonathan Swan is one of them. If he says this happened, it happened. Besides, we already knew that Fuentes was with Kanye that night because it was on video. I had just hoped that maybe he was left in the parking lot or something.

The failure points here are almost too plentiful to keep up with. For starters, does Trump not have any staffers around him? Did none of them see Fuentes and think “maybe we should throw up a red flag on this” in an attempt to stop this dinner from occurring? It’s one thing to sit down with Kanye, who is struggling with mental illness and has a prior relationship with the former president. It’s another to have dinner with (and allegedly praise) a freaking white supremacist who denies the Holocaust.

Secondly, Trump himself owns some responsibility. If he didn’t know who Fuentes is (which seems probable), he should have sought out that information before allowing him in. These kinds of self-inflicted wounds are mind-numbing, and if you thought Charlottesville haunted Trump, wait until the press latches onto him having dinner with one of the organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally that took place. This is going to be a disaster.

But you know what? I don’t even care about the political aspects of this as much as I care about the fact that it’s just wrong. Yeah, I voted for and supported Trump, but I’m not going to be forced to defend something I know is indefensible. This entire thing is ridiculous, and none of us, including Trump’s most hardcore supporters, have to keep putting up with it. Trump is letting us down, not the other way around.

Here’s the choice that is coming into view. You can spend the next two years fighting these stupid, self-inflicted distractions only to likely lose the general election, or you can have a real primary and explore every option. Trump did a lot of good things, but it’s not 2016 anymore. For me, the question is who is most likely to deliver the policy goals I seek because as I’ve said many times, politics is not a cult of personality. The moment a politician isn’t useful to me, they can go jump in a lake.

Trump appears ready and willing to make himself expendable, even if only out of pure ignorance, and that’s not anyone’s fault by his. These self-inflicted wounds are never going to stop, and it’s up to GOP voters to decide whether they want to keep this ride going.

UPDATE:

When you’ve lost Breitbart…