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Former president has denied knowing that Kanye West’s 2024 campaign adviser is an outspoken antisemite
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Kanye West releases 2024 campaign video after meeting with Trump
Criticism continues to pour in after the former president hosted a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West, who has gone on an antisemitic rampage of late, and his associate Nick Fuentes, one of the US’s most notorious white supremacist activists – and it seems top Jewish Republicans are turning against the former president.
One leader of a right-wing pro-Israel lobby group told The New York Times that “Donald Trump is not an antisemite. He loves Israel. He loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”
Meanwhile, a federal judge has dismissed Donald Trump’s claim that he has “presidential immunity” from a lawsuit about his actions around the 2020 election – in the latest blow to the former president as the fallout over a meeting with Kanye West and a white supremacist continues.
Civil rights groups including the NAACP are suing Mr Trump and the Republican National Committee for trying to disenfranchise voters, intimidate election officials and undermine lawfully cast votes in violation of both the federal Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act.
While Mr Trump’s lawyers claimed that he has “absolute immunity”, DC District Judge Emmet Sullivan disagreed.
The white nationalist who found his way into a meeting with former President Donald Trump now says that the far-right needs to “dream bigger” than the ex-president or his 2024 campaign.
Mr Fuentes, a relentless bigot whose authoritarian vision is to turn the GOP into a “truly reactionary party” grounded in white Christian nationalism, believes that Mr Trump’s campaign and his predicted GOP rival Ron DeSantis for the 2024 presidential nomination “are both inferior to the campaign that Trump ran in 2016.”
Read more from Alex Woodward in The Independent:
Virulent antisemite and far-right influencer no longer sees Trump as the vehicle for nationalist agenda
More information is coming out about what exactly transpired during Kanye West and Nick Fuentes’ meeting with former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Mr West, who recently torpedoed his music career by launching into a string of bizarre antisemitic rants on social media causing his commercial sponsors to desert him in droves, has previously sought out Mr Trump at Trump Tower in New York City and at the White House during his presidency on a whim.
We know now that he wants to run either against or alongside Donald Trump in 2024, as well as what happened when America’s most prominent white nationalist met the president.
Read more:
Ex-president under fire over questionable guests at Mar-a-Lago
Donald Trump’s former No 2 defended the ex-president from accusations of antisemitism in a new interview this week, but condemned his decision to meet with one of America’s most prominent racists and Holocaust deniers at Mar-a-Lago alongside rapper Kanye West.
Mike Pence said that his former boss should apologise and called the meeting “wrong” — though the former president has denied knowledge of Nick Fuentes or his views, he has nevertheless faced criticism for not listening to aides who told him the dinner was a mistake and for agreeing to meet with Mr West as well given his recent antisemitic comments.
Read more:
Former vice-president denied criticisms that Donald Trump is antisemitic
Instead of confronting a littany of problems facing the US Congress in the lame duck session, Senate Republicans have found themselves stuck in a time warp, spending Monday evening having to answer for former president Donald Trump’s misdeeds, writes Eric Garcia for The Independent.
This time around, the disaster is his dinner with white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes and rapper-turned-professional bigot Ye, formerly known as Kanye West.
It’s an eerie flashback to the days of Mr Trump’s first campaign and presidency, when Senate Republicans were obliged to answer for every outrageous tweet, egregious insult or outright lie he told.
Read more:
“If the reports are true and the president didn’t know who he was, whoever allowed them in the room should have been fired,” Senator Thom Tillis said this week
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke to reporters on Tuesday and took former President Donald Trump at his word over his claim that he did not know white nationalist broadcaster Nick Fuentes before Fuentes appeared at dinner with Mr Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.
The Republican House leader had not issued a statement about the meeting between a former president and one of the US’s most prominent racists until he was asked by reporters about the issue on Tuesday after he left the White House following a meeting with Joe Biden and other members of congressional leadership.
Watch below:
The US Supreme Court’s legal counsel has dismissed an ethics inquiry from two top Democratic members of Congress after Justice Samuel Alito was accused of leaking the outcome of a landmark case in 2014.
A letter from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson pressed Chief Justice John Roberts to answer questions about alleged breaches after a former anti-abortion activist with an influential lobbying group told the court that powerful donors leaked a ruling from a major contraception case after they dined with Justice Alito.
Supreme Court attorney Ethan Torrey did not answer the letter’s questions about that alleged leak or the leak of a draft opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
“There is nothing to suggest that Justice Alito’s actions violated ethical standards,” Mr Torrey wrote on 28 November.
Alex Woodward reports:
Top Democrats says the court’s latest response is ‘an embodiment of the problems at the court around ethics issues’ after justice is accused of leaking major contraception case in 2014
Senator Marco Rubio had a particularly aggressive rebuke of Nick Fuentes, one of America’s most infamous white nationalists and antisemites, on Monday after former President Donald Trump faced another day of questions and criticism surrounding the Mar-a-Lago meetup with Mr Fuentes and rapper Kanye West.
The Florida Republican made the comment to CNN, telling the network that Mr Fuentes “is a purveyor and a spreader of an evil, poison”.
“I hope he will [condemn Fuentes],” Mr Rubio continued. “Because I know he’s not an antisemite. I can tell you that for a fact that Trump is not, but this guy is evil. And that guy’s just a nasty, disgusting person. He’s an a** clown.”
John Bowden reports:
Florida senator headlined rally alongside Trump days before midterms
As many Republican members of Congress keep quiet about Donald Trump’s dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, Mike Lawler, one of the new class of GOP representatives who won the party its ultra-narrow majority, has weighed in on the row in unsparing terms – albeit without mentioning Donald Trump’s name.
Mr Lawler is something of a hero in the House GOP conference having unseated DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney in a redrawn New York district.
The lawyer representing former president Donald Trump in the lawsuit he filed after he was previously banned from Twitter has said he will not drop the case despite having been reinstated to the platform by the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.
Attorney John Cole told Bloomberg News that Mr Trump will continue to appeal the case’s dismissal by a California federal judge unless the company enters into an agreement to formally settle the lawsuit.
The twice-impeached ex-president filed the lawsuit in July 2021, six months after then-CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Mr Trump’s account had been permanently suspended from the platform in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. His account has now been reinstated, but he has yet to use it, preferring instead to stick with Truth Social despite its dramatically smaller user base and limited reach.
Andrew Feinberg has more.
Mr Trump’s account is once again active on the site but the ex-president has not yet used it
In today’s Inside Washington dispatch, Eric Garcia reports from Capitol Hill, where he and other reporters have been asking Republican Senators to weigh in on Donald Trump’s antisemitic dinner party last week:
Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has mainly been focusing on getting the Respect for Marriage Act over the finish line, vocally denounced the meeting.
“First, I honestly didn’t know who he was,” he told The Independent. “If the reports are true and the president didn’t know who he was, whoever allowed them in the room should have been fired.”
This new willingness among many Republicans to condemn the former president began to show itself after the midterm elections. Several of Mr Trump’s endorsed candidates flopped in winnable races, arguably costing his party the Senate and limiting its House majority to a mere handful of votes. (Side note: The batch of failed Trump endorsements makes a convenient alibi for those who don’t want to blame the overturning of Roe v Wade). The fact other Republicans, like Ron DeSantis, are looking ever more viable for a 2024 race means a convenient off-ramp could soon be in sight.
Read the full analysis below.
“If the reports are true and the president didn’t know who he was, whoever allowed them in the room should have been fired,” Senator Thom Tillis said this week
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Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago
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