Donald Trump has instituted a tight vetting process for all future meetings after his planned dinner with “Ye,” formerly known as Kanye West, turned into a public relations nightmare for the former president. West turned up for his private dinner with Trump with a collection of strangers who turned out to be a rogue’s gallery of weirdos. Worse, if that’s possible, one of the controversial guests says they crashed the dinner on purpose to “punk” Trump.
The dinner, which took place the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, has been castigated by many, including Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, who said the former president needed to apologize immediately for the matter.
The dinner included Nick Fuentes, a reputed racist, and Milo Yiannopoulos, himself driven from his Breitbart editor’s post and polite society for his views on “consensual” sex between adults and children. Discussion included criticism that the president hadn’t helped January 6 prisoners and stopped listening to his most ardent fans.
West detailed how the dinner came to be scheduled during an appearance on Tim Pool’s IRL YouTube show. The dinner was scheduled before West’s Twitter tirade about Jews.
“I was talking to Trump for about a month. We had scheduled the dinner in October and then he announced for the presidency. He pushed the dinner back to November — and I’ve been pulling together a campaign — and after I put up the deathcon tweet, a bunch of people who had been canceled, like Alex Jones, started getting in touch with other people that are you know inside of the Matrix, and Alex Jones’s producer said that Milo [Yiannopoulos] wanted to contact me. And here we are.”
All three walked out of the interview after about 30 minutes. See it below.
Trump’s eagerness to please got in his way again at the Mar-a-Lago dinner. After they got there, Ye says he talked to Trump and asked “do you want to sit alone? And Trump said, ‘no, bring your friends in.'” He went on to say “a big thing is that Trump had no idea who Nick Fuentes was.”
Ye said of Fuentes, “he was rolling with me. I was impressed with Nick. And I was like, just come to the dinner.” They were also accompanied by a Boeing engineer and a former Trump campaign volunteer.
Yiannopoulos said it was he who brought Fuentes because he has “extreme brain firepower” and is the “most extraordinarily brilliant commentator of his generation.” And he thought Fuentes “deserved to be in the room, too.” But it appears there was more to it than that.
The network also reported that it appears Yiannopoulos, acting as an adviser to Ye’s presidential run, brought the controversial figures on purpose. Yiannopoulos said he “arranged the dinner ‘just to make Trump’s life miserable’ because news of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it.” He told NBC, “I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most.” The controversial and canceled journalist told the network, “[T]he people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end.”
NBC News spoke to an unnamed Trump insider who believes that it was a setup. “The master troll got trolled. Kanye punked Trump.”
Trump fumed afterward that Ye had betrayed him by ambushing him. “He tried to f— me. He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said, according to one confidant, who then relayed the conversation to NBC News on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
“Trump was totally blindsided,” the source said of Fuentes’ presence. “It was a setup.”
If they’d wanted to make an impression on Trump, they succeeded. And in the worst way.
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