Donald Trump came under fire on Monday from an increasing number of Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, for having dinner with a Holocaust denier and the artist formerly known as Kanye West just days after announcing his third bid for the White House.
In an interview, Pence demanded an apology from Trump and claimed the former president had “demonstrated profoundly poor judgment” when he met with West, now known as Ye, and Nick Fuentes, a far-right activist with a long history of advocating antisemitic and white nationalist views, last week at his Mar-a-Lago club.
“President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier, a seat at the table and I think he should apologize for it. And he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification,” Pence said.
Nevertheless, Pence, who is thinking about making a run against his former employer, said he does not think Trump is antisemitic or racist and that if he were, he would not have been Trump’s vice president.
Even though the previous president is in a position of extreme vulnerability, he chose to criticize Trump’s behavior while simultaneously defending the man. This decision highlights the former president’s continued control over the party. He is largely to blame for the party’s poorer-than-expected performance in this year’s midterm elections, according to many of the top fundraisers and strategists for the party, who are increasingly saying that it’s time to move on. At the same time, Trump continues to enjoy tremendous support from the GOP base, and even contenders for the party’s presidential candidacy run the danger of alienating those supporters if they criticize him harshly enough.
Some faulted Trump’s administration for allowing Fuentes to attend the meal even though no staff members were present, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
“If he wasn’t familiar with him, then whoever had responsibility for knowing the backgrounds of the people in the room, I hope they are already fired,” Tillis told reporters.
He responded, “I’ll leave that to President Trump,” when asked if Trump ought to provide an apology.
Others were less ambiguous.
“President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites. These attitudes are immoral and should not be entertained. This is not the Republican Party,” tweeted Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.
“There’s no room for anti-Semitism or white supremacy in the Republican Party. Period,” added Florida Sen. Rick Scott.
“Yeah, the meeting was bad. He shouldn’t have done it,” stated Lindsey Graham before he added that “there’s a double standard about this kind of stuff and I don’t think it will matter in terms of his political future.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., stated that he supposed Trump can “have dinner with whomever he wants to have dinner with, but I wouldn’t have dinner with him. I’ll put it that way.”
Others who were considering running against Trump for the GOP nomination, such as House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and others, remained mute.
Leading Jewish organizations and Trump’s previous ambassador to Israel have already expressed their disapproval of the gathering. But up until Monday, not many Republicans had commented.
One potential competitor for Trump in 2024 was Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey told the New York Times the dinner was “just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024.”
Asa Hutchinson, the retiring governor of Arkansas who is considering a run for president, described the meeting as “very troubling” and said “it shouldn’t happen” on CNN on Sunday.
“When you meet with people, you empower. And that’s what you have to avoid. You want to diminish their strength, not empower them. Stay away from them,” he said.
Another potential rival for 2024, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, called antisemitism “a disease” but made no direct mention of the meal or the president he worked for.
