Donald Trump Once Had A Disastrous Pre-Thanksgiving Dinner With Kanye West

Donald Trump was introduced as the next president of the United States during his announcement at his Mar-a-Lago resort that he would be running for the country's highest office for the third time. His intention to move back into the White House was made official on November 15, 2022. A week later, two days before Thanksgiving, he had dinner with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. One of the biggest issues that people had with the Ye / Trump dinner was that they were also joined by Nick Fuentes, an alt-right white supremacist and Holocaust denier. Fuentes was there at the nearly two-hour dinner at the invitation of Ye. Needless to say, people weren't happy about the get-together.

There was a fair amount of fallout in the wake of the Trump, Ye, and Fuentes dinner. It even got a response from the White House, with an official issuing a statement which read, per CNN: "Bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in America — including at Mar-A-Lago. Holocaust denial is repugnant and dangerous, and it must be forcefully condemned."

Trump was aware of the negative attention that his dinner was getting, and he posted to Truth Social about it, claiming he was doing a good deed rather than enjoying a social call. "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 claimed. Of course, that wasn't the whole story.

Ye was certainly in a bad place business-wise around the time of the Mar-a-Lago meal. About a month before, in October 2022, Adidas ended their multi-million dollar deal with Ye over his continued anti-semitic remarks, including him saying, "I can say anti-semitic s*** and Adidas can't drop me." After mounting public pressure, the German sportswear company did, in fact, drop Ye, as did other companies, which cost him, as he put it, "$2 billion in one day."

Trump discussed his meal with Ye and Nick Fuentes in his Truth Social post in what appeared to be an attempt to distance himself from having associated with Fuentes. "[Ye] shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn't know, the other a political person who I haven't seen in years," Trump claimed. However, even if he didn't know who Fuentes was when he arrived at the meal, it sounds like Trump liked what he heard from him. After the Mar-a-Lago meeting, Ye talked about the meeting in a now-deleted post on Twitter. He said Fuentes was "actually a [Trump] loyalist and that Trump "is really impressed with Fuentes."

Donald Trump acknowledged that they did talk about Ye's presidential hopes at Mar-a-Lago. "I told him don't run for office, a total waste of time, can't win," Trump claimed. What the former "Apprentice" star didn't mention is that Ye apparently asked Trump to be his running mate. Of course, Ye talked about it. "I think the thing that Trump was most perturbed about, me asking him to be my vice president," Ye wrote in a now-deleted Twitter post. Ye announced he'd be running for president in 2024 shortly after that Mar-a-Lago dinner, but his personal attorney has since said that's not actually happening. Trump also didn't say anything about the fact that he spent part of their conversation criticizing Ye's ex-wife Kim Kardashian, per Axios.

Despite Trump's claims that he didn't know Fuentes, he does have at least one thing in common with him, as does Ye — they've all been banned from X, formerly known as Twitter, at various times. Trump's ban came after the January 6, 2021 insurrection "due to the risk of further incitement of violence," as Twitter put it at the time. Fuentes was first banned in July 2021 for making antisemitic remarks. After he was reinstated, he was banned again within a day after posting, among other things, a video about Ye running for president in 2024. Ye was suspended from Twitter in October 2022 because of a number of antisemitic tweets.