GOP leaders can't get their stories straight over Trump's white nationalist dinner: report

On Tuesday, Axios reported that the top Republican leaders in Congress, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), are at odds with each other in their responses to former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago dinner meeting with anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West and neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes.

"Although they both denounced him, McCarthy falsely claimed Trump condemned Fuentes, who often promotes racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, after they met at Mar-a-Lago," reported Sareen Habeshian. "'I don't think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes,' McCarthy, a staunch Trump ally, said. 'He has no place in this Republican Party. I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him and didn't know who he was,' he continued."

Trump has not, in fact, condemned Fuentes since the meeting, only saying that he did not know who Fuentes was.

"Meanwhile, McConnell opened a press conference Tuesday saying, 'There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or white supremacy, and anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States,'" noted the report. This comes despite the fact that McConnell previously said he would support Trump again if he were the 2024 nominee — a question he dodged when asked again this week.

This comes as Trump himself has turned on McConnell, publicly blaming him for the GOP's failure to win a majority in the Senate in the 2022 midterms, claiming he "blew" the election — even though most losing candidates were elevated to the nomination by Trump's endorsement.

Fuentes, who gained national prominence during the Stop the Steal protests in 2020, has described himself as "just like Hitler," and has openly called for America to be a white Christian theocracy in which Jews are stripped of political and cultural power.