Trump Hosts White Nationalist For Dinner At Mar-a-Lago, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Holocaust Deniers Could Not Get A Table

PALM BEACH, Fla. Former president Donald J. Trump welcomed self-described white nationalist Nick Fuentes to his private Mar-a-Lago club for an intimate dinner on Tuesday, generously extending the hospitality of his ballroom to a Holocaust denier exactly one week after announcing his third campaign for the presidency.

The former president, who shared the table with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, took pains to clarify that he had no idea who his guest was. "Ye unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about," Trump explained afterward, adding that he "didn't know Nick Fuentes" and could not reasonably have been expected to identify a man before the entrees arrived. Sources within his circle confirmed that the dinner had concluded before anyone thought to brief the candidate on the views of the person seated across from him.

At a property where annual membership runs well into six figures and every visitor passes through Secret Service screening, aides noted that the club's vetting apparatus had performed flawlessly, successfully confirming that Mr. Fuentes carried no weapon while declining, as a matter of long-standing policy, to inquire about his opinions on the Holocaust. The arrangement preserved the former president's preferred posture of plausible unfamiliarity, under which any guest may be both warmly hosted and, if necessary, never previously heard of.

The dinner came as Ye was shedding corporate partnerships over a series of antisemitic remarks, and as Mr. Fuentes, an admirer of Adolf Hitler who has questioned the scale of the Holocaust, sought the one thing his movement had always lacked: a photograph with a man who had been, and intended again to be, president of the United States. By close of the evening he had it, along with the assurance that the doors of Mar-a-Lago remained open to those willing to make a reservation.

In the days that followed, a handful of Republican officials issued statements describing the dinner as unfortunate, while a larger number, asked directly whether they condemned it, discovered pressing reasons to be elsewhere. The former president himself declined to disavow either guest, observing only that he holds a great many meetings and that the country had bigger things to worry about than whom he feeds.

At press time, Trump had clarified that he takes thousands of dinners a year and cannot be held responsible for recognizing every Holocaust denier who happens to join him for the chicken.