NBC recently ran an article on the Trump dinner with Kanye (“Ye”) in which Milo and Nick Fuentes tagged along with Ye and met Trump. Trump, the article admits, was thinking he would just have a private, uneventful dinner with Ye and was suprised that Fuentes and Milo were there, though he didn’t know who Fuentes is. As the NBC article reports:
Just two days before Thanksgiving, Donald Trump was planning to have a private, uneventful dinner with an old friend: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.
[…]But Trump may have been walking into a trap in Mar-a-Lago’s gilded halls — one that leveraged his own penchant for spectacle and showmanship against him. Ye arrived with three guests, including white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Trump has since said he didn’t know Fuentes or his background when they dined together, a claim Fuentes confirmed in an interview, but others at the crowded members-only club figured out his identity. News of the meeting prompted an avalanche of criticism, from some Republican rivals and allies of Trump and his then-week-old presidential campaign.
The important lines there are “Trump may have been walking into a trap” and “News of the meeting prompted an avalanche of criticism, from some Republican rivals”.
Well, now the Conservative Treehouse is pinning Mitch McConnell as one of the ones responsible for turning the accidental dinner into a bludgeon with which he can bash Trump, commenting that:
The media and political opposition gleefully latched on to the successful targeting operation, in an effort to smear Donald Trump. In typical Alinsky fashion, the goal is to controversialize the operational target. Senator Mitch McConnell followed up today with his own pile on supported by his Senate leadership.
Given Mitch’s well known use of fabricated political racism to attack Republicans who do not bend a knee to him, his statements are pure skullduggery.
McConnell, though he doesn’t appear to have had any involvement in arranging the meeting, has latched onto the dinner as a way to attack Trump, at the very least, as he spoke on it during his weekly news conference and said “There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy.”
He then made his comments more explicitly anti-Trump, saying “Let me just say again, there is simply no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy. That would apply to all of the leaders in the party who will be seeking offices.”
Watch him here:
So, even if McConnell wasn’t responsible for setting up the meeting (right now it looks like Ye and Milo arranged the meeting as a way to get some media notoriety and brought Nick along because of his controversial view), he has certainly used it as a way to try and chart a different path. That path, of course, is moving the GOP away from Trump and toward a more Establishment one now that he can justify it by saying that Trump met with an “anti-Semite”.
In conclusion, it doesn’t currently look like McConnell backed the dinner, though he did latch onto it near-immediately as a way to attack Trump, even after the truth about what Trump knew and didn’t know came out.
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