I'm sorry, but I actually laughed at Donald Trump blaming Kanye West for bringing the white supremacist to his house for dinner.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump responded to criticism over allegedly hosting a dinner with Ye—a man who blew up his billionaire status by repeatedly making antisemitic comments—and his friend, white supremacist Nick Fuentes, at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
“So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice’,” Trump wrote in a message posted on Saturday.
“He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!”
Trump is dumb and evil and I wish him nothing but the absolute worst for the rest of his miserable existence. On the other hand, I’m sad to confirm he can be still be funny sometimes.
I know the political press still has a crush on Ron DeSantis, the socially awkward discount version of Trump, but I’m telling y’all, there is no way another GOP candidate can beat Trump. It’s going to take more to topple a celebrity racist with comedic timing.
Aside from evil having a funny bone, while I’m not in the habit of taking Trump’s side on an issue, I believe him here.
Donald Trump is usually too busy caught up in himself to focus on others, much less recognize someone only famous to internet bigots. Nor is it not at all surprising to find that Kanye, a Black man, would be hanging around a racist known to use phrases like “n*gger voters.” In 2015, A.P.C. founder Jean Touitou used the N-word to describe his latest collection and claimed Kanye approved the move. I’m sure he did.
A Black man who argues slavery was a choice is the kind of goofy Black man who would travel with a racist to another racist’s house for a social visit.
Trump is not wrong about Kanye being a seriously troubled man who apparently hangs out with Holocaust deniers and has with no chance of becoming president of the United States of America—but Kanye is not the reason the two apparently hit it off so well.
Yet it has been surreal to watch so many political reporters, columnists, and pundits once again tiptoe around the obvious. As much as people want to complain about how stale Trump’s political career is, so is the coverage of him. It has never been a secret that Donald Trump is a bigot and his affinity for white nationalists and supremacists has been repeatedly proven over and over again—most notably last year during his coup attempt.
The sky is blue, water is wet, Kanye West needs to take his medication and be deprogrammed, and Donald Trump is a damn racist.
We don’t need to hear from people like David Friedman, who served as Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to Israel from 2017–2021, feigning shock that Trump doesn’t mind a social dinner with folks who are into Adolf Hitler.
“To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this,” Friedman wrote on Twitter Friday. “Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable.”
“I condemned Barak Obama associating with Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright,” Friedman added. “This is no different. Antisemites deserve no quarter among American leaders, right or left.”
For the record, it is a dumb, ugly false equivalence to compare Jeremiah Wright to Louis Farrakhan. One is an actual theologian who saw his legitimate criticism of American foreign policy as a pastor with a former calypso singer presently with strange ties to an alleged cult. Beyond that, as fascinating as the lies people tell themselves can be generally, on this issue, enough.
This is not a hard story to decipher.
Kanye West is a bigot.
Nick Fuentes is a bigot.
Donald Trump is a bigot.
It makes sense that they found each other—and that they’ve already turned on each other.
Fuentes has been a longtime supporter of Trump, but days after the controversy, he reportedly said:
“Conservative media speculates that Ye and I are being used to hurt Trump. It is the other way around. Trump and MTG (Marjorie Taylor Green) are being used as bait to lure the base back into supporting people like Kevin McCarthy, Ronna McDaniel, and Rick Grenell. I didn’t leave the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement left me.
What are Christian Americans going to get out of a McCarthy speakership or new Trump White House? Lower gas prices? Reduce the corporate tax rate?
Years will pass us by as things remain fundamentally the same. We must dream bigger. There’s only one guy talking about how the aspirations of the Trump movement have been hijacked by people like (Jared) Kushner.”
All of the men involved are petulant narcissists with a penchant for taking out their insecurities on others through bigotry.
Even so, much like everyone else, once Trump clears the field next year, he will be the nominee and they will fall in line.
Their bickering doesn’t matter. What matters is that Trump is a racist who tells you he is racist every chance he gets. It is common knowledge, and in 2022, we have to break the cycle of how stories like these are covered.
We know Trump is racist and enjoys the company of white supremacy. What we need now is what yet another direct nod from Trump to white supremacy means about his base of supporters and the GOP writ large? But don’t worry: the campaign is so early.
I’m sure there will be many others swinging by Mar-a-lago.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is republished with author's permission. Read more of Michael Arceneaux's work on Medium.