No Mistakes Were Made.

Trump inviting anti-Semites and white supremacists to dinner is part of a broader effort to make hate normal.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

It’s not particularly surprising that Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump had dinner with a white supremacist incel, but it does tell us a whole lot about where the GOP is headed and what conservatives are willing to embrace.

Last week, Trump had Kanye West (now “Ye”) and professional fascist Nick Fuentes over to his Mar-a-Lago club. Fuentes, a woman-hating virgin who has stated that “sex with women is gay,” also believes that liberal movements including feminism, LGBT rights, and civil rights come from a “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed. The Founders never intended for America to be a refugee camp for nonwhite people.”  He has suggested that men whose wives are getting out of line should “give her a vicious and forceful backhanded slap with your knuckles right across her face – disrespectfully – and make it hurt?” He has called conservatives who work for Jewish bosses or alongside Jewish coworkers “race traitors.” He has written that “Jews have too much power in our society” and “Christians should have all the power, everyone else very little.”

Trump, for his part, claims that he didn’t know who Fuentes was. This is, of course, a lie. The former president at the very least has people who google his dinner guests — I don’t think someone like me, for example, would get into Trump’s private dining room, even if I was somehow hanging out with Kanye West.

But Trump doesn’t deny inviting Kanye, who secured himself much-desired attention when he tweeted that he was about to go “Death Con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” He’s been on an anti-Semitic spree ever since.

And yet Republicans have not rallied against this full-on embrace of Jew hate. Sure, a few of them have said they disapprove of Fuentes meeting with Trump, but many of the most prominent members of the party have bought Trump’s excuse that he didn’t know Fuentes. Ok — a lie, but ok. But he definitely knew Kanye, and he knew exactly what Kanye has said about Jewish people (and women, but misogyny has long been a Trump staple, and in no way disqualifying in the GOP).

This should be disqualifying in and of itself: The Republican frontrunner for the presidency invited a man to dinner when that man is currently widely known for threatening to go “Death Con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”