Donald Trump is defending his controversial meeting with Kanye West.
In case you missed it, the 45-year-old rapper traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Resort in Florida earlier this week with Nick Fuentes – a right-wing political activist known for spewing his white supremacist and antisemitic views. Their meeting instantly sparked backlash, with Deputy White House Press Secretary Andrew Bates slamming the dinner:
“Bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in America — including at Mar-A-Lago. Holocaust denial is repugnant and dangerous, and it must be forcefully condemned.”
President Joe Biden even quipped when asked about the dinner:
“You don’t want to hear what I think.”
In response to the criticism, the 76-year-old denied knowing Fuentes prior to the meeting in a statement to CBS News:
“Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”
Related: Kim Is ‘Disgusted’ That Ye Allegedly Showed Explicit Pics Of Her To Employees
Then, in a bizarre presidential campaign video posted after the dinner, Kanye – who has come under fire for his antisemitic comments – mentioned the controversial get-together with the businessman and Nick, saying Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes.” The Yeezy designer also said things got heated between them when he suggested that the former president should be his running mate in the forthcoming election, and Trump made a degrading comment about his ex-wife Kim Kardashian:
“[Trump said] ‘you can tell her I said that.’ I was thinking, like, that’s the mother of my children. … When Trump started basically screaming at the table telling me I was gonna lose, I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history? I’m like, ‘wait, hold on Trump, you’re talking to Ye.’”
However, Trump initially downplayed the interaction in a post on Truth Social. He said, per CNN:
“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.”
But now as Trump continues to face backlash over the meeting, he blasted Ye as “a seriously troubled man” in a fiery message on Saturday night on his social media platform, writing:
“So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has 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.”
He continued:
“He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!”
Hmm… So this latest statement slightly contradicts his previous one in which he claimed he knew none of the Stronger artist’s guests. According to NBC, sources claimed one of the guests had been Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s Florida director in 2016, and he knew her personally.
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[Image via Dan Jackman/WENN, MEGA/WENN]
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