FACT CHECK: Jonathan Karl Falsely Claims Trump Hasn’t Denounced Nick Fuentes

CLAIM: Former President Donald Trump has never denounced white supremacist Nick Fuentes, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said on Sunday.

VERDICT: FALSE. Trump denounced Fuentes specifically and explicitly in 2022.

Jonathan Karl questioned Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), on Sunday about a dinner that Trump had hosted at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, in November 2022.

Kanye West — who had only just begun to expose the depths of his own antisemitic views — attended, and brought Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist not well known beyond the murkier corners of the Internet (he had been banned from many platforms), and unknown to Trump at the time.

Vance said, “President Trump has issued plenty of condemnations on this.” Karl responded: “But not of Fuentes.”

That is plainly wrong.

As Breitbart News’ Matt Boyle reported in December 2022, Trump said that Fuentes and those who share his views had no place in the “America First” movement or within the Republican Party.

To quote from Boyle’s interview:

At the start of the interview, Breitbart News asked him, as the leader of the party and the movement, whether the views of Fuentes have any place in the GOP or the America First movement.

“No, they don’t,” Trump replied plainly.

…

Trump, in his interview with Breitbart News, expanded upon the circumstances of what happened for the first time in-depth in an interview since the events unfolded. In these comments, Trump made clear he did not know until after the dinner that West himself had recently made a series of antisemitic remarks. Trump also attacked the media for their coverage of the dinner, saying they “shouldn’t have” made “a big deal over” it.

“Very importantly, I didn’t know him [Fuentes] and I never heard of him,” Trump told Breitbart News. “Kanye—I knew Kanye. Kanye was very nice to me and very respectful of me. Kanye went on Tucker Carlson and said Trump is the greatest guy — I’m the only one he mentioned — and so Kanye called, and he needed some help and advice. I agreed to that. He brought a group of people along. One of the people was this one. How would I know what Kanye’s views of the world are? I didn’t do a study of Kanye. I didn’t do a study as to what he thinks of a certain race or a certain religion or anything else. I think it was a very good meeting from the standpoint of we discussed a lot of things, but this wasn’t even discussed. This was not a subject or red-flag subject. Then, I only heard a day or two after that that he had said some very negative antisemitic remarks. But he didn’t say anything negative at all about anything in terms of antisemitic during that dinner. The dinner was a quick dinner. The dinner went very quickly and then they went off and then I found out who the other one was. There were other people too. One was a real estate person, and one was a person in politics who everybody knew, well-known and respected. The fake news media made a big deal over something, and they shouldn’t have done that.”

Asked again to be sure that he meant Fuentes’s views — and anyone else espousing antisemitism or Holocaust denialism or racism—do not have any place in the America First movement or the GOP, Trump stated it explicitly that they do not.

“No, they don’t. Nobody does that has the wrong and ill will about people,” Trump said. “We don’t want ill will. But again, it was very unfairly covered. It was very, very unfairly covered.”