Former Gov. Chris Christie blasted Donald Trump's 2024 comeback attempt after his latest racist scandal.
"Former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night had dinner with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist who is one of the country's most prominent young white supremacists, at Mr. Trump's private club in Florida, advisers to Mr. Trump conceded on Friday," The New York Times reported Friday. "Also at the dinner was the performer Kanye West, who has also been condemned for making antisemitic statements."
West, who legally changed his name to Ye, said Trump was "really impressed" with Fuentes.
"I like this guy, he gets me," Trump reportedly said.
"In recent years, Mr. Fuentes, 24, has developed a high profile on the far right and forged ties with such Republican lawmakers as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, largely through his leadership of an annual white-supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference," The Times reported. "A Holocaust denier and unabashed racist, Mr. Fuentes openly uses hateful language on his podcast, in recent weeks calling for the military to be sent into Black neighborhoods and demanding that Jews leave the country."
Christie, who may himself seek the GOP nomination again, said the scandal was disqualifying.
"This is 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," Christie told the newspaper.
The former GOP governor speculated on what was motivating Trump.
"He can't stand not having attention all the time," Christie said. "And so, having someone show up at his club — even if you believe that he didn't know who Nick Fuentes was — and want to sit with him, feeds the hunger he feels for the attention he's missing since he left the presidency."
According to the Anti-Defamation League, "Nicholas Fuentes is a white supremacist leader and organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP. Nicholas Fuentes first gained widespread notoriety in 2017 when he left Boston University after he reported receiving 'threats' tied to his attendance at the white supremacist 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, Virginia."
And the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, "Nick Fuentes is a white nationalist livestreamer who advocates pulling the Republican Party further to the extreme far-right end of the political spectrum. An outspoken admirer of fascists such as Mussolini, Fuentes emerged as an influential figure on the national stage during the now-infamous "Stop the Steal" movement, which relied on misinformation to falsely claim that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election and sought to overturn the results of it."
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