Had Fuentes not been there, would Trump’s sitting down for a meal with Ye have generated anything close to the same headlines? Was Trump’s error simply one of the scale of the antisemitism toward which he was apparently indifferent?
The Trump-Fuentes confab has provoked a very familiar conversation about whether Republican leaders would take Trump to task, a conversation that takes on only a slightly different hue because of Trump’s announced 2024 presidential candidacy. But the more important consideration is how Trump and others in his party continue to allow the boundaries of acceptable behavior from their potential supporters to expand outward.
Let’s acknowledge that the Trump-Ye-Fuentes dinner raises a host of other questions that would seem to be ones that Republican officials might want to address. Does the guy leading in 2024 nominating polls just sit down to eat with anyone? Is anyone vetting Mar-a-Lago attendance at all, much less for access to Trump? How does this obvious failure color understanding of Trump’s months-long retention of classified documents, including in an unlocked room accessible to the public? These would seem to be problems for the GOP at least in the abstract, particularly should Trump again be the party’s presidential nominee.
