Days after meeting Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago alongside Kanye West, virulently antisemitic white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes has underscored his far-right agenda to push the Republican Party even further right, believing that the former president’s so-called Make America Great Again movement no longer can be used as a vehicle for his far-right agenda.
Mr Fuentes, a relentless bigot whose authoritarian vision is to turn the GOP into a “truly reactionary party” grounded in white Christian nationalism, believes that Mr Trump’s campaign and his predicted GOP rival Ron DeSantis for the 2024 presidential nomination “are both inferior to the campaign that Trump ran in 2016.”
“DeSantis is a moderate and he would moderate Trump: lose-lose,” he wrote on Telegram. “We need Trump and a NEW candidate who will outflank him on his right.”
He added that he wants to support a candidate “who isn’t on the ‘Republican Jewish Coalition’ speaker list”.
“Conservative media speculates that Ye and I are being used to hurt Trump… it is the other way around,” he added.
Mr Fuentes claims that “Trump and [far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene] are being used as bait to lure the base back” to support top Republicans like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel.
“I didn’t leave the MAGA movement,” he wrote. “The MAGA movement left me.”
“What are Christian Americans going to get out of a McCarthy speakership or a new Trump White House? Lower gas prices? Reduce the corporate tax rate? Years will pass us by as things remain fundamentally the same,” he added. “We must dream bigger.”
He also shared a video clip of West saying that “Trump would be a great president but he’s gotta put God first in everything he does.”
Mr Fuentes, galvanised by West’s antisemitism and apparent presidential ambitions, had accompanied the rapper to the former president’s Mar-a-Lago property, where Trump was “really impressed” by Fuentes, according to West.
On his broadcast, Mr Fuentes said he told Mr Trump that he was one of the “greatest Americans that has ever lived” and pointed to his support at various “Stop the Steal” protests across the US fuelled by a persistent lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
“He really has been a hero of mine,” he said. “Although, based on the announcement speech ... we have to move forward, in service of Christ, in service of the truth, and in service of America.”
Mr Fuentes added a race between Mr Trump and Mr DeSantis is a “huge retreat from 2016”, which Mr Fuentes saw as a platform to advance an extreme “America First” agenda.
Following the trip, the 24-year-old announced that he planned to suspend his programme as he transitions to working on West’s presidential campaign.
Asked on Monday whether President Joe Biden’s administration has a response to the former president’s meeting with Mr Fuentes, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the administration “totally rejects bigotry, racism, antisemitism, and there is just no place for these vile forces in our society … including Holocaust deniers.”
“When you say things like this, when you do not speak out against these types of poisonous or dangerous remarks … that is also incredibly dangerous within itself,” she added. “We should all be condemning this, and be very clear, and say it in absolute clear terms.”
