(Bloomberg) -- Former President Donald Trump dined this week at his Mar-a-Lago resort with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West who’s been criticized for recent anti-Semitic remarks, and a white supremacist who accompanied him.
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Karen Giorno, a former senior adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, confirmed that she had dinner on Tuesday with Trump, Ye and Nick Fuentes, one of the most prominent white nationalist leaders in the US. An additional person she didn’t know also attended, she said.
The visit drew criticism from a White House spokesman who said anti-Semitism has no place in America, “including at Mar-a-Lago.” David Friedman, who was Trump’s ambassador to Israel, called the visit by West and Fuentes “unacceptable,” adding “you are better than this.”
Trump posted on his Truth Social site that he dined Tuesday with Ye and that the rapper “unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about.”
The former president said Ye had asked “for advice concerning some of his difficulties, in particular having to do with his business. We also discussed, to a lesser extent, politics, where I told him he should definitely not run for president, ‘any voters you may have should vote for TRUMP.’ Anyway, we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism.”
Trump added: “Also, I didn’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Fuentes is well known as the founder of the America First Foundation, which he says on the organization’s website was...
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