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“I think the former president is a spent political force.” So wrote New York Times columnist Bret Stephens of Donald J. Trump this week. Trump is apparently so spent that Stephens felt the need to pen an 879-word op-ed in the nation’s putatively leading newspaper about who the master of Mar-a-Lago ate dinner with a week earlier.
This followed a separate article about the infamous dinner Trump hosted with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes that Stephens wrote with his co-columnist Gail Collins, along with no fewer than seven other pieces about the dinner that have, as of this writing, blessed the former paper of record.
The Times is hardly alone. The Washington Post offered its readers six articles about the dinner, while the Wall Street Journal has produced five such pieces.
The New York Post, which relegated Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign announcement to a page 26 satire with a mock below-the-fold headline “Florida Man Makes Announcement,” has thrown its faux reticence to the mild Florida breeze and printed a whopping thirteen articles about the dinner, an average of almost two per day. Now that takes the Trump Chocolate Cake!
With culinary coverage unequaled since the Last Supper, President Trump can still rely upon what he has always relied upon: the mainstream media’s utter fascination with him, his many decades of living the truth that there really is no such thing as bad publicity. He can be secure in the knowledge that he will stay in the spotlight no matter what he does or who he does it with or to. Thanks to Elon Musk, he can even tweet again, but with this much press, why would he?
The facts of the dinner are nauseatingly well known, though details continue to emerge. On November 22, Kanye West, now apparently calling himself “Ye” and heavily criticized for recent anti-Semitic statements, requested a personal meeting with Trump, with whom he’d struck up a friendship. He arrived at Mar-a-Lago with three unannounced guests: an antisemitic cretin called Nick Fuentes, disgraced right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and an unnamed man identified as the father of a student at a California private school founded by West. In what some have claimed was a breach of security, the whole party was admitted to Trump’s private club and residence, even though only West was expected.
The dubious trio proceeded to meet the former president, who has repeatedly claimed not to have known who the additional guests were, apart from a fleeting past acquaintance with Yiannopoulos. They conversed at table until West announced he would run for president and unwisely offered to make Trump his running mate. Trump angrily rose and berated West, yelling that he could never win and shouldn’t run, before abruptly ending the meeting.
Trump and West have issued public statements concurring that the meeting was stormy and ended badly. It doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement of West, Fuentes, Yiannopoulos, their ideas, their plans, or their prejudices. Eyewitnesses here in Palm Beach who were at Mar-a-Lago that night have confirmed this to me off the record.
According to NBC News, a source close to Trump corroborated that the former president thought West “crazy” and declared that he “tried to f— me.” Trump added that he was “totally blindsided” by Fuentes’s presence, declaring, “It was a setup.” Yiannopoulos, who West has announced will be his campaign manager, subsequently confirmed Trump’s suspicion, saying that he wanted to “make Trump’s life miserable” as the “architect” of a scheme to embarrass the former president by infiltrating Fuentes into his presence. Trump’s campaign has announced that it will adopt new vetting and gatekeeping procedures to control access and monitor personal meetings.
No matter what happens next, it doesn’t seem likely that the offensive trio will ever again be welcomed back to Mar-a-Lago. All that’s left is the media’s obsession with their ill-fated dinner and the marquee limelight it will continue to shine upon Trump without any effort or cost on his part. The more the pundits complain about it, the more it looks like they are pushing yet another “get Trump quick” scheme that will go nowhere.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute
