Former
President Donald Trump hosted white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick
Fuentes and rapper Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach this week,
showing his continued willingness to associate with figures who have a
well-publicized antisemitic view as he embarks on another White House run.

Fuentes,
who often posts racist content along with Holocaust revisionism, was brought as
a guest of rapper Kanye West, who has legally changed his name to Ye.

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Kanye
shared a video Thursday on Twitter in which he claimed that Trump “is really
impressed with Fuentes.” He said Fuentes is actually a loyalist to Trump,
unlike others who abandoned the former president after the 2020 election.

In a
text message conversation posted on Twitter by West on Thursday, he and Fuentes
said they both met with Trump.

According
to a report on CNN, Fuentes was a guest of Kanye’s and was not invited by the
former president.

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Trump
confirmed the meeting in a post on his social media site Truth Social saying,
“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly
thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew
nothing about. 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.”

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In a
post later Friday on Truth Social, Trump repeated that he “didn’t know” Fuentes
and had offered West business as well as political advice. “I told him he
should definitely not run for President, ‘any voters you may have should vote
for TRUMP,’” the former president wrote. “Anyway, we got along great, he
expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said
about me on ‘Tucker Carlson,” he added.

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West’s
latest antisemitic comments caused companies that he was affiliated with –
including Adidas and Balenciaga to cut their ties with him. He has made several
inflammatory statements over the years, including assertions that slavery was a
“choice” and “racism is a dated concept.”

Fuentes
has been banned from most major social media platforms for his White
nationalist rhetoric. The Anti-Defamation League has also identified him as a
White supremacist.

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Trump
has often been criticized for his embrace of extreme-right figureheads. He
refused to
condemn white supremacists and other far-right groups during the first 2020
presidential debate,
instead telling the Proud Boys extremist group to “stand back and stand by”.

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According
to a Southern Poverty Law Centre report in March 2020, white nationalist hate groups
increased by 55% during Trump’s tenure, saying that the surge stemmed from “a
deep fear of demographic change.”