House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy condemned white nationalist Nick Fuentes on Tuesday after the controversial figure joined President Donald Trump for dinner as a guest of rapper Kanye West.
“I don’t think that anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy was questioned about Trump’s dinner and Fuentes after the House Minority Leader met at the White House with President Joe Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Fuentes, a podcaster and online personality, has a history of spreading White Nationalist and antisemitic views, including questioning the Holocaust.
McCarthy was blunt in condemning Fuentes.
“I condemn his ideology. It has no place in society at all,” he said.
Fuentes has voiced support for racial segregation and promised a “tidal wave of white identity” after marching at the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville in 2017.
Prominent Jewish Republicans have criticized Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and West, noting the pair have vocalized “unacceptable” views about Jews.
Trump’s former ambassador to Israel David Friedman wrote on social media:
To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this. Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.
Trump reacted to the controversy by asserting that he did not know the identity of Fuentes or his controversial views when West brought him to dinner at Mar-a-Lago as a guest last week.
“Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about,” Trump told Breitbart News.
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