American conservatives like to say that the way to stop Donald Trump in 2024 is to hit him from the right. Compared with his own political movement, they argue, Trump has always been something of a squish when it comes to issues such as Covid vaccines, gay marriage, criminal justice, or border control. He never did build that wall – not properly, anyway. Any candidate wanting to take down the father of Trumpism should therefore keep pointing out that Daddy had four years in the White House and never lived up to the hype. Take note, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Yet no one could have anticipated that the Trump 2024 campaign’s first headache would come not from DeSantis but from the artist currently known as Ye and a pair of far-right mischief monkeys called Milo Yiannopoulos and Nicholas J. Fuentes. Last week, Trump somehow ended up hosting Ye and Fuentes at a pre-Thanksgiving dinner in Mar-a-Lago. The fallout has been spectacular.
For readers who don’t spend their lives monitoring the bubbling cauldron of the very online right, this story may need some background. Let’s start with Ye, or Kanye Omari West, to use his birth name. He is a rapper, fashion designer and pop-culture icon who wants to be president. In the 2020 presidential election, running as leader of the beautifully named Birthday Party, he spent $13 million (12 million of it his, reportedly) and got more than 70,000 votes. For his 2024 effort, Ye has hired the controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos to help his campaign. Ye and Milo connected through an intermediary after Ye got in trouble for sending a tweet saying: ‘I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going def con 3 on Jewish people.’
Yiannopoulos, who now describes himself as ‘ex-gay’, recruited Fuentes to Team Ye 2024 as ‘extra brain firepower’.
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