White nationalist Nick Fuentes is expressing his sincere gratitude to Donald Trump after the president defended right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson’s decision to host the notoriously antisemitic activist for an interview on his eponymous podcast.
Fuentes took to X after Trump spoke out in support of Carlson during a question-and-answer session with reporters over the weekend, sharing a video of the interaction and writing: “Thank you Mr. President!”
Trump had been asked about Carlson’s decision to platform the racist conservative, which has set off a rhetorical civil war within the president’s Make America Great Again movement and exposed divisions between what has become the Trump-era GOP mainstream and a younger, more aggressive faction who have demonstrated a disturbing openness to Fuentes’ brand of unabashed racism and white nationalism.
He told reporters Carlson had "said good things about me over the years" and suggested that “people have to decide” if it was appropriate for the ex-Fox News host Carlson to give Fuentes a platform.
"You can't tell him who to interview,” Trump said. "If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don't know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out... people have to decide."
Trump later added: "Meeting people, talking to people for somebody like Tucker — that's what they do. You know, people are controversial."
The chummy sit-down between Carlson and Fuentes has threatened to fracture some of the GOP’s most powerful institutions and forced many of the party’s most prominent members to take sides.
One such entity that has been roiled by the uproar over the Carlson-Fuentes chat is the Heritage Foundation, where the conservative think tank’s president, Kevin Roberts, has faced calls for his ouster from the group after he posted a video to social media defending Carlson for platforming the openly racist Fuentes.
Trump’s refusal to condemn Fuentes or criticize Carlson for the remarkably uncritical interview he conducted comes three years after the president, then out of office, hosted the podcaster at his Mar-a-Lago club for dinner along with antisemitic rapper Kanye West, who was then going by the handle “Ye.”
Republicans, even some who’d served in Trump’s first administration, condemned the then-former president’s decision to share a meal with the two notorious antisemites. One such critic was Trump’s first Vice President Mike Pence, who said it was wrong for his ex-boss "to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier, a seat at the table."
At the time, Trump denied having met Fuentes before he ate dinner with him and claimed he “knew nothing about” him.
He repeated those denials on Sunday and claimed that he hadn’t known Fuentes would be coming to Mar-a-Lago with West.
