White nationalist Nick Fuentes insisted “I love Donald Trump” as the fallout from his Mar-a-Lago dinner with Kanye West and the one-term president continues.
The Holocaust denier’s presence at Mr Trump’s Florida home was designed to “to make Trump’s life miserable”, according to Milo Yiannopoulos who is now acting as a political adviser to the rapper.
Mr Yiannopolous and Mr Fuentes told NBC News that they had set up Mr Trump in an attempt to damage him politically after he announced his 2024 candidacy.
But Mr Fuentes appeared to later walk that back on Telegram, stating: “My intention was not to hurt Trump by attending the dinner, that is fake news. I love Donald Trump.”
And he added: “The Trump Dinner was not a ‘set-up,’ and I never said it was.”
Mr Yiannopolous told the news network that they had wanted to give Mr Trump an honest view of how some in his base viewed his candidacy.
“I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with,” he said.
“I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end.”
And he added that he knew that the presence of Mr Fuentes would leak and that he believed Mr Trump would mishandle it.
“I hate to say it, but the chickens are coming home to roost. You know, this is the frustration with his base and with his true loyalists,” Mr Fuentes told NBC News.
A source close to Mr Trump told NBC News that the former president had been “totally blindsided” by Mr Fuentes being there and described it as “a setup.”
During the dinner, West reportedly angered Mr Trump by asking the former president to be his running mate for the rapper’s own 2024 presidential campaign.
“He tried to f*** me. He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” Mr Trump said afterwards, according to one anonymous aide.
Mr Fuentes, 24, attended the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and has called the Jewish people “a hostile tribal elite.”
“Jews have too much power in our society. Christians should have all the power, everyone else very little,” he wrote on Telegram earlier this month.
West has also been embroiled in his own anti-semitic controversy that has seen him lose a string of high-profile business deals and was dropped by Adidas, GAP, Balenciaga and his agents.
