Republican House leader McCarthy condemns Trump’s white supremacist guest Fuentes

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Kevin McCarthy, a top congressional Republican, broke his silence on Monday about former President Donald Trump’s dinner with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, saying the Republican Party has no place in it for Fuentes’ beliefs.

McCarthy, who may become speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives when Republicans take control in January, had not commented on the meeting, which took place a week ago.

He was pressed for his thoughts on the meeting by reporters at the White House after talks with President Joe Biden.

“I don’t think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes,” said McCarthy, currently the House minority leader. “His views are nowhere within the Republican Party or within this country itself.”

Trump has said the encounter at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, was inadvertent, but the meeting has drawn rare criticism from fellow Republicans, some of whom accused Trump of empowering extremism.

Fuentes has been described as a white supremacist by the U.S. Justice Department. The Anti-Defamation League said Fuentes once “‘jokingly denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in concentration camps to cookies in an oven.'”

Trump on Nov. 15 began his third consecutive run for the presidency, saying he would seek the Republican nomination for the 2024 election.

While president, Trump was broadly criticized for not explicitly condemning white nationalists whose August 2017 rally on a college campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, was seen as having provoked violence with counter-protesters, one of whom died.

“You also had people that were very fine people on both sides,” Trump said at the time.

PENCE CALLS FOR APOLOGY

Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence on Monday called for an apology from Trump for the meeting with Fuentes.

“President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an anti-Semite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table, and I think he should apologize,” Pence said in a televised interview with NewsNation.

McCarthy, who is seeking to take over as House speaker when Republicans assume control of the chamber in January, said Trump said he didn’t know who Fuentes was.

“I condemn his ideology. It has no place in society,” he said of Fuentes. Tuesday’s comments were McCarthy’s first directly addressing the Trump dinner.

Fuentes attended the dinner with Ye, the musician formerly known as Kanye West, who has also drawn widespread criticism for anti-Semitic comments.

“The president will have meetings with who he wants. I don’t think anybody, though, should have a meeting with Nick Fuentes, and his views should come nowhere within the Republican Party or the country itself,” McCarthy said.

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