Deep in a long piece about Donald Trump's life at Mar-a-Lago since his 2024 presidential announcement went down in flames instead of catching fire with his fans, Intelligencer's Olivia Nuzzi asked him if former advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump could have been of help in keeping him from his Kanye West firestorm.
According to his response, he did not appreciate the question.
As Nuzzi reports, the former president is at loose ends as he holes up at his Florida resort, with one adviser candidly admitting, "He just goes, plays golf, comes back, and f*cks off," before admitting, "His world has gotten much smaller. His world is so, so small.”
With that in mind, the report turned to the bigger news than Trump's jump into the 2024 Republican Party presidential race -- his dalliance with controversial rapper Kanye West and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes over dinner around Thanksgiving that set off a week-long firestorm for consorting with noted anti-semites.
As the report notes, Trump insiders implored son-in-law Kushner -- who is Jewish -- to come to the ex-president's defense and he refused, reportedly saying something to the effect of "Look, I’m out. I’m really out."
Asked by Nuzzi if he still needs Kushner and daughter Ivanka's counsel, the former president reportedly bristled.
"Without his daughter and son-in-law to turn to in the wake of dinner with Ye and Fuentes, Trump was left to defend himself on his preferred platform, Truth Social," Nuzzi wrote before adding that the former president told her, "Kanye West called me up, and he wanted to know if I could meet him because he has a lot of problems. And I did that. He brought some people that I didn’t — Nick Fuentes — who I didn’t know at all. We sat down, we had a very quick meal. It wasn’t two hours, as somebody said. It was a very quick meal, it went very fast."
Pressed about not getting any help from his daughter and son-in-law, Nuzzi wrote that Trump became "defensive."
“I don’t need anybody’s advice! I don’t need any advice! I’m pretty good. I think I’m pretty good at doing advice,” he told her.
Pressed by Nuzzi, "If he was so good, why did he have dinner with an anti-semite?" she reported he told her, “I had dinner with a very troubled man who was asking for help, and I didn’t know his views on Israel because I don’t study Kanye. I didn’t know that Kanye said anything negative about Israel because it’s not exactly something that I would be in a position to know.”
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