Former US President Donald Trump points to the media while speaking at the North Carolina GOP convention dinner in Greenville, North Carolina, U.S. June 5, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Drake

The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) on Friday condemned former President Donald Trump’s dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club on Tuesday with antisemitic rapper Kanye West and the Holocaust-denying alt-right figure Nick Fuentes.

West, who now goes by the name Ye, posted on Twitter Thursday to describe the meeting. In a video labeled “Mar-a-Lago debrief,” that included the message “#Ye24”, indicating his intention to run for the Presidency, West said that Trump was “most perturbed” that West asked Trump to be his running mate for the Vice Presidency in 2024. Trump announced his own candidacy for re-election as President on 16 November.

In 2019, Fuentes used the “analogy” of “baked cookies” to dispute the number of Jews killed  in the Holocaust.

“How long would it take you to make 6 million? Hmm, I don’t know, it certainly wouldn’t be five years, right? The math doesn’t seem to add up…. I don’t think you’d result in 6 million, maybe 200,000-300,000 cookies,” he said. In 2021 he tweeted that the “next big frontier for populist and conservative inc to coopt [sic] is discussing Jewish Power. Somehow I don’t think they’ll broach that one!” At the AFPAC conference in February, Fuentes praised Vladimir Putin by highlighting how Putin’s critics compare him to Adolf Hitler. “And now they’re going on about Russia and ‘Vladimir Putin is Hitler’ and they say that’s not a good thing,” he said, before pausing, laughing, and saying that he “shouldn’t have said that” to laughter from the crowd.

West said that Trump was “really impressed” with Fuentes at the dinner. “So, Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes, and Nick Fuentes, unlike so many other lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he’s actually a loyalist,” West says in the debrief. 

The Republican Jewish Coalition, which featured Trump as a keynote speaker by remote video at their leadership conference on 19 November, condemned the meeting without mentioning Trump by name. “We strongly condemn the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes and call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.”

Trump in a statement said that the dinner was intended to be between him and West and that he didn’t know who Fuentes was.

Fuentes, who was removed from YouTube in 2020 for hate speech, has been criticized by RJC in the past for his meetings with political leaders. In February, after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) attended Fuentes’ America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), they described Fuentes as a “Nazi-symapthizer.” “It is appalling and outrageous that a Member of Congress would share a platform with an individual who has actively spread antisemitic bile, mocked the Holocaust, and promoted dangerous anti-Israel conspiracy theories,” they said.

West for his part has been denounced by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and other Jewish groups for a series of antisemitic statements that have come to light since October. “Although some have tried, there is no rationale, no explaining away Kanye West’s rants on social media for anything else than what they are: vicious antisemitic statements that pose a clear and present danger to every Jewish person,” said AJC’s CEO Ted Deutch in October.

In his twitter videos describing the Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump, West said that his question to Trump “would be” why he didn’t free January 6 rioters when he had the chance to pardon them as President. It’s not clear if he raised the issue with the former President at the dinner.