A Tale of Two Dinners
Elegance at the White House, Vulgarity at Mar-a-Lago
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump’s recent dinner guests were in the news, and the symbolism of each tells a story about the state of things these days.
The current occupant of the White House hosted a state dinner for the President of France. Music was provided by New Orleans entertainer Jon Batiste. Over 300 guests included government officials, top law makers, famous entertainers, and, of course, big donors, all dressed to the nines in formal attire.
From Politico:
Biden’s first state dinner comes nearly two years into his first term, after Covid put such pageantry on pause. The president’s selection of France as the guest is a testament to Biden and Macron’s close relationship — on full display Thursday as the two leaders referred to each other as “friend” in their chummy interactions, which included the French president frequently patting his U.S. counterpart on the back and referring to him as “Dear Joe.”
The menu at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue included caviar and butter-poached lobster for a first-course, and the outdoor tent erected for the occasion was inspired by red, white and blue, the shared colors of the American and French flags.
Via the Associated Press:
There were kisses all around as the Bidens stepped out on the North Portico to welcome the Macrons — Jill Biden in an off-the-shoulder navy Oscar de la Renta gown, Brigitte Macron in a high-necked ivory one by Louis Vuitton.
A week prior, Mar a Lago’s would-be monarch hosted a pre-Thanksgiving dinner for four including a whack-a-doodle (Ye) and the nation’s highest profile white nationalist anti-Semite (Nick Fuentes). Guests at the dining room stood and applauded as the former-President led his blue jean clad visitors to a specially reserved table on the patio.
The dinner was a set-up, orchestrated by Milo Yiannopoulos, an anti-Trump, far-right provocateur generally shunned even in extremist circles, designed to confront its host with unvarnished view of how a portion of his base views his candidacy.
From Politico:
Describing the event to Milo Yiannopoulos, a far-right provocateur who he hired to help with his campaign, West (Ye) said that he also asked Trump to be his running mate in 2024, and said that Trump was “screaming” at him during the dinner, and that the former president called his ex-wife profanities.
“When Trump started basically screaming at me at the table, telling me I was going to lose. I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history? I’m like, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on Trump, you’re talking to Ye,” West said.
Various accounts of what transpired differ in details, but the consensus was that Ye was speaking from a place somewhere outside the bounds of reality, and Fuentes spent the evening heaping flattery on Trump, who returned the favor by reportedly saying “He gets me.”
Via the Associated Press:
Trump, who generally views backtracking as a sign of weakness, has a long history of failing to condemn bigotry and hate speech in what some have attributed to concerns about alienating parts of his base who are open to such views.
Dinner with a fascist isn’t generally considered good behavior even for a Republican politician, but the slow and meek roll out of criticism proves that the name Trump strikes fear in the hearts of would-be 2024 presidential candidates.
Jake Lakut at the Daily Beast says there may be upwards of 20 candidates expected to run in 2024.
In the shadow of 2016’s rambunctious and borderline noxious GOP presidential debates, the Republican National Committee is considering not just tinkering with the format, but adopting potentially drastic changes in anticipation of a crowded field.
The internal discussions include a push to get rid of debate moderators altogether, a move that could rankle network executives in an era where just over one in 10 GOP voters say they trust mass media. If overcrowded fields are now the norm in American politics, the RNC debate discussions have taken that into account—but that’s about where the agreement stops.
Here’s Noah Berlatsky, writing at The Public Notice:
Ye’s meeting with Trump puts the the country on notice that the GOP has not pulled itself back from the abyss, but is instead thrashing towards the pit on its belly like some sort of craven caterpillar, with each of its segments trying to tear the legs off the others. Maybe Republicans will stop short of the edge and total annihilation. Maybe, somehow, unexpectedly, the GOP in 2024 will eschew conspiracy theories and election denial. Maybe less extreme candidates like Pence or even Liz Cheney will prove to have a surprising amount of juice. But it’s also possible that the campaign season that started with Nick Fuentes will only get worse from here.
Meanwhile Ye and Fuentes added to the controversy by appearing on an Alex Jones Infowars panel. Via The Times of Israel:.
“I see good things about Hitler,” West, who also goes by Ye, told Jones during the bizarre appearance on the Infowars Network, alongside Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. “Every human being has value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”
“I like Hitler,” he added later, and called himself a Nazi.
The interview with West, whose face was concealed under a black ski mask, also included antisemitic comments from Jones, who referred to a “Jewish mafia,” and Fuentes, an outspoken white supremacist who has been called West’s “campaign manager.”
Jones, a serial provocateur who has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for claiming one of America’s deadliest school shootings was a “hoax,” tried to push back against West’s praise for Hitler and Nazis, saying that “the Nazis were thugs and did really bad things.”
“They did good things too,” West said. “We’ve got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time.”
As outrageous as all the actions by Ye/Kanye West and the rest of these characters seem to be, they obscure the fact that anti-Semitism is rapidly moving from the fringes of society toward the mainstream.
The Anti Defamation League’s Heat Tracker lists nearly 1500 incidents of alleged anti-Jewish vandalism, harassment and assault. 2021 set an all-time record for these incidents, and the ADL says 2022 is looking much the same.
NPR notes that Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was a speaker at a fundraising event hosted by Fuentes and has suffered no political consequences.
As Republicans take over the house in January, Greene is expected to regain committee assignments that Democrats stripped her of based, in part, on her promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Among the most prominent examples was Greene's claim that California wildfires may have been caused by the Rothschilds, a prominent Jewish banking family and mainstay in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
"That's old-school, classic modern antisemitism coming from the 1870s and eighties and nineties into the 20th century," said Joshua Shanes, a Jewish Studies professor at the College of Charleston.
"There's rhetoric that's accepted today that simply never would have possibly been accepted a generation ago, not since the 1930s, really," said Shanes. "People call it [political correctness], but there's a benefit to saying it is unacceptable to be openly racist, to be openly antisemitic. And if you are, you will not win political office. But that has gone away."
There’s no doubt the far right is ramping up their hate agenda, and the mainstreaming of misogyny, racism, and antisemitism can’t be ignored. Never again can soon be now.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com