Guess who’s coming to dinner? A mentally ill rapper, a neo-Nazi and a born-again apologist for pederasty. If it sounds like a set-up for a bad joke or a Mel Brooks skit, that’s because it is. It is what Donald Trump always was: a deliberate failure of taste. No one is laughing now.
After Thanksgiving, we eat leftover turkey for days. Trump’s post-Thanksgiving guest Kanye West brought Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos along: the racist dregs of American life, the reheated leftovers of the 2016 alt-right. A meeting of cranks and has-beens, crackpots and self-publicists, Jew-baiters and Jew-haters.
It’s a Barnum and Bailey world. If further proof were needed that Kanye West has lost his marbles, look no further than him palling up with Fuentes, a perverse and talentless white racist who thinks he’s West’s racial superior, and Yiannopoulos, a high-camp camera-seeker and certifiable creep.
Kanye West and Donald Trump
Donald Trump with Kanye ‘Ye’ West
Trump’s private parties are of public interest. He is still the nominal leader of the Republican Party. He is running for the Republicans’ presidential nomination in 2024. But he is already yesterday’s man.
Hosting the “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” crowd makes him the centre of attention again, but it confirms his decline into a freakshow act.
Fuentes and Yiannopoulos talk the online language of trolls and LOLs, but they are sincere and sinister racists. “I don’t know Nick Fuentes,” Trump has said by way of explanation.
Fuentes has since confirmed that he wasn’t invited. The FBI knows Fuentes, and accurately call him a “white supremacist”. It’s quite possible that Trump didn’t know him. Fuentes is small fry, one of the lowlifes who hitched a ride on the Trump train.
That he got onto the premises at all shows how Trump’s operation has turned into one long amateur night.
Trump retains his intuitive talent to offend, but he has lost his touch and is losing his appeal.
In November’s midterms, Trump-endorsed candidates failed to win their races. In polls, Trump is the only Republican that Joe Biden beats. His daughter Ivanka has left it be known that she won’t be on his team this time around. Third time unlucky.
Senior Republicans are starting to say what they have privately known since the riot at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Trump is a liability, for the same reasons he was once an asset.
“President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites,” said Sen Bill Cassidy. “These attitudes are immoral and should not be entertained.”
Jewish Republicans and conservatives are stricken. A couple of weeks ago, the Zionist Organization of America gave Trump its Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion at its 125th anniversary dinner in New York City. Now, the ZOA’s leader Morton Klein says he is “frightened for my people”.
“Donald Trump is not an antisemite,” Klein said on Monday. “He loves Israel and he loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimises Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”
The Democrats are delighted. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, said nothing in 2016 when Bernie Sanders had a well-publicised sit-down with Al Sharpton, who incited a pogrom in Crown Heights in 1991.
Schumer also stayed shtum when a 2005 photo came to light of Barack Obama, then on the verge of running for the presidency, grinning away with Louis Farrakhan, one of America’s top antisemites. On Monday, Schumer calls Trump’s dinner “pure evil”. Third time lucky.
“Evil” is, in my view, an accurate description of Fuentes and Yiannopoulos. After the dinner, Yiannopoulos, who is British, attacked Trump in the stunted vocabulary of American racism, for “continuing to suck the boots of the Jewish powers that be who hate Jesus Christ, hate our country, and see us all as disposable cattle according to their ‘holy book’”.
“Evil” is also, I believe, an accurate description of the effect of Kanye West becoming their disinhibited mouthpiece, and the amplifying effect of Trump associating with them. By accident or design, the effect is much the same.
“This is not the Republican Party,” Sen Cassidy insists. But it is a significant part. Trump didn’t invent the Republicans’ nationalist and isolationist wing or their fringe cohort of racists.
Nor did he invent the internet, which has dissolved the barriers between the fringe and the mainstream and reduced political discourse to the lowest common denominator.
But Trump rose to power by exploiting both. He broke the Republicans and now the Republicans, whether they like it or not, own him and the mess he’s made.
In 1913, Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, said that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” We shall see.
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
