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Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson accused Trump of
empowering extremism.
"I don't think it's a good idea for a leader who's setting an
example for the country or the party to meet with an avowed
racist or anti-Semite," Hutchinson told CNN.
Representative James Comer, a Republican lawmaker from Kentucky,
said Trump needed "better judgment (on) who he dines with."
"I would not take a meeting with that person," Comer told NBC's
"Meet the Press."
Trump earlier this month said he plans to seek the Republican
nomination to run for the White House again in 2024, though he
could face challengers to that bid, including from Florida
Governor Ron DeSantis.
Fuentes has been described as a white supremacist by the U.S.
Justice Department and he attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally in
Washington that preceded the attack on the Capitol by Trump
supporters. The Anti-Defamation League said Fuentes once
"'jokingly' denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in
concentration camps to cookies in an oven.'"
Trump said the encounter with Fuentes happened during a dinner
meeting last week with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye
West, who himself has drawn widespread criticism for making
anti-Semitic statements.
Trump in a message on his Truth Social media site said he met
with Ye and "we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism,
& I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on
'Tucker Carlson.'
"Why wouldn't I agree to meet? Also, I didn't know Nick
Fuentes," Trump wrote.
The White House slammed Trump, saying in a statement that
"bigotry, hate, and antisemitism have absolutely no place in
America — including at Mar-A-Lago."
President Joe Biden shrugged off a question from reporters about
the incident, saying: "You don't want to hear what I think."
David Friedman, Trump's former ambassador to Israel, said
anti-Semites "deserve no quarter among American leaders, right
or left."
"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," Friedman wrote on Twitter.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart, Nandita Bose and Ismail Shakil;
Editing by Scott Malone and Mark Porter)
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