Former President Donald Trump was reportedly “blindsided” during a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida last week.
On Tuesday, NBC News published an extensive report about the dinner Trump had planned with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.
The outlet noted Ye arrived along with three guests, including “white nationalist and antisemite” Nick Fuentes.
“We saw everybody in the dining room get up and start applauding, and then the president entered,” Fuentes told NBC News.
Fuentes added, “He greeted us, and he invited Ye into dinner and Ye said that he wanted to bring us with him to the table. So we walked in and Ye took some pictures with some of the guests in the dining room and then we sat down at the table.”
He claimed Trump made sure they “sat at his specially reserved table on the patio for all to see.”
One longtime Trump adviser said what was clear was that Fuentes’ presence was “part of a headline-grabbing setup,” as NBC News reported.
“The master troll got trolled,” the adviser explained. “Kanye punked Trump.”
Some have suggested Trump was ultimately tricked by the rapper and his guests.
According to the report, the suspicion is supported by Milo Yiannopoulos, the “anti-Trump, far-right provocateur who is now acting as a political adviser to Ye,” as NBC News explains.
Yiannopoulos declared he was “the architect” of the plan to have Fuentes go with Ye in the hopes that he would be included in the dinner with Trump.
The intent, Yiannopoulos said, was for Fuentes to provide Trump with an “unvarnished view of how a portion of his base views his candidacy.”
Yiannopoulos declared he “wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end.”
Additionally, Yiannopoulos shared that he organized the dinner “just to make Trump’s life miserable” because news of the dinner would ultimately end up leaking and Trump would then mishandle it.
Fuentes similarly said, “I hate to say it, but the chickens are coming home to roost. You know, this is the frustration with his base and with his true loyalists.”
The source said of Fuentes’ presence at the dinner, “Trump was totally blindsided,” adding, “It was a setup.”
Trump reportedly expressed his anger with Ye after the dinner.
“He tried to f— me. He’s crazy. He can’t beat me,” Trump said, according to one confidant, as NBC News reported.
Some Republican senators were not hesitant to speak out on the dinner earlier this week.
“There’s no bottom to the degree to which he’s willing to degrade himself, and the country for that matter,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said.
Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) argued the dinner is “just a bad idea on every level. I don’t know who was advising him on his staff but I hope that whoever that person was got fired.”