THE TRUMP BRAND:

Fuentes has openly admired Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is currently making war on Russia's neighbor Ukraine. A Holocaust denier, Fuentes is associated with America's neo-Nazis.

In February 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference to compete from the right with the Conservative Political Action Conference. In May 2021, on a livestream, Fuentes said: "My job...is to keep pushing things further. We, because nobody else will, have to push the envelope. And we're gonna get called names. We're gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever.... When the party is where we are two years later, we're not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular. But that's okay. That's our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party. And if we didn't exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time."

Fuentes and his "America First" followers, called "Groypers" after a cartoon amphibian (I'm not kidding), backed Trump's lies that he had actually won the 2020 election. At a rally shortly after the election, Fuentes told his followers to "storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years." Fuentes and Groypers were at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and at least seven of them have been charged with federal crimes for their association with that attack. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Fuentes himself.

Accounts of the dinner suggest that Trump and Fuentes hit it off, with Trump allegedly saying, "I like this guy, he gets me," after Fuentes urged Trump to speak freely off the cuff rather than reading teleprompters and trying to appear presidential as his handlers advise.

But Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 just days ago, and being seen publicly with far-right white supremacist Fuentes--in addition to Ye--indicates his embrace of the far right. 

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