A small but increasing number of GOP senators are criticizing Donald Trump for his dinner meeting last week with rapper Kanye ‘Ye’ West and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. While former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Mike Pence already criticized the former president, others on Monday came out of the shadows, including Senate Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) who told reporters that the dinner was “just a bad idea on every level,” per The Huffington Post. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), chief of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, told reporters that “there’s no room in the Republican Party for white supremacists and antisemitism, so it’s wrong.” Trump’s one-time V.P. Mike Pence also joined the chorus, telling NewsNation in an interview Monday that “President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table. And I think he should apologize for it.” Though many Republicans declined to comment on the meeting, which saw ‘Ye’ bring Fuentes to Mar-a-Lago as a guest to meet with the former president, perhaps the boldest comments came from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who said he hopes to see the former president condemn Fuentes, “because I know [Trump’s] not an antisemite. I can tell you that for a fact that Trump is not but this guy [Fuentes] is evil. And that guy’s just a nasty, disgusting person. He’s an ass clown.” Trump commented on Truth Social after the backlash that he didn’t know who Fuentes was and that the dinner “was intended to be Kanye and me only.”
