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Rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, speaks during a meeting with then-President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington D.C. on October 11, 2018. Calla Kessler\/The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n
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- Trump recently hosted Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago for dinner along with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.<\/li>\n
- While defending the dinner, Trump said the rapper was “a seriously troubled man, who happens to be Black.”<\/li>\n
- West claimed Trump screamed at him during the dinner over the rapper’s ambitions to run for president in 2024.
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\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nFormer President Trump described Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, as “a seriously troubled man, who happens to be Black,” as he defended hosting him at Mar-a-Lago for a controversial dinner.<\/p>\n
Ye brought Nick Fuentes<\/a>, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier, to the dinner, which sparked widespread controversy and condemnation. Trump has claimed that he did not know who Fuentes was prior to the meeting.<\/p>\n
Trump claimed on\u00a0Truth Social<\/a>\u00a0on Saturday that Ye had requested the meeting at Mar-a-Lago and that he gave the rapper much-needed “advice.”<\/p>\n
The former president said that Ye had been “decimated in his business and virtually everything else” but noted that he has “always been good to me.”<\/p>\n
Numerous companies<\/a>\u00a0have cut ties with the rap star after he generated controversy by making\u00a0antisemitic comments<\/a>\u00a0and wearing a shirt with the words “White Lives Matter<\/a>” on it \u2013 a slogan widely used by white supremacists, according to the\u00a0Anti-Defamation League<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Ye, who has suggested he plans to run for president in 2024, claimed that Trump\u00a0screamed at him<\/a>\u00a0during the dinner and told him he would lose if he ran. The rapper said Trump was “perturbed” when he asked him to be his running mate.<\/p>\n
Trump said in his statement that he told Ye not to run for office as it was “a total waste of time, can’t win.”<\/p>\n
The former president recently announced his plans to run for president for the third time.<\/p>\n
Ye previously ran in 2020, but his campaign ended after he gained only 70,000 votes, per the\u00a0BBC<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Trump also claimed that Ye brought three people to the dinner, two of whom he didn’t know and one being someone he hadn’t seen in years.<\/p>\n
His latest statement slightly contradicts a\u00a0previous one<\/a>\u00a0in which he claimed he knew nothing about any of Ye’s guests. Sources told\u00a0NBC News<\/a>\u00a0that one of the guests was Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s Florida director in 2016, and someone Trump knew personally.<\/p>\n
One anonymous longtime Trump adviser told\u00a0NBC News<\/a>\u00a0that the fallout from the Mar-a-Lago dinner was a “fucking nightmare.”<\/p>\n
The\u00a0White House,<\/a>\u00a0former GOP governor\u00a0Chris Christie<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Trump’s former ambassador to Israel<\/a>\u00a0have been among those criticizing Trump for dining with Ye and Fuentes.<\/p>\n