Trump ‘goes deeper into the heart of darkness’, warns former aide to Mike Pence

Donald Trump’s disturbing dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week with Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes is further evidence that Trump has been slipping even “deeper into the heart of darkness” since losing the US election. 2020, a former top aide to former Vice President Mike Pence said.

Last Tuesday’s dinner with Fuentes and Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was “incredibly bad judgement” on Trump’s part, former Pence chief of staff Marc Short said Sunday on “the CNN’s ‘State of the Union’.

“There is no excuse for this,” he added.

Short said he agreed with comments made by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (right), who said Friday the dinner made Trump an “untenable” candidate for president. Christie and Pence could decide to launch their own campaigns for the presidency.

Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye was ironic, given that Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, converted to Judaism, Short noted.

But “since the 2020 elections, I think the [former] the president has descended deeper into the heart of darkness here,” Short said. “I think it’s a big challenge [and] another reason Republicans are looking in a different direction in 2024.”

CNN political commentator Ashley Allison called the dinner no surprise.

Allison reminded Short that Trump supporters carrying Nazi flags marched past counter-protesters chanting “Jews won’t replace us” in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Trump insisted at the time that there were ‘very good people’ on both sides.

Why “would we be surprised if an anti-Semite came down to dinner with him? she asked. “Donald Trump is homophobic; he is an anti-Semite, he does racist things,” she added. If he becomes president again, it “will continue to polarize us and cause this heightened tension of hatred and violence,” she added.

Fuentes is a leading racist and anti-Semite who has called for denying women the right to vote. Ye vowed in October on Twitter to go “death con 3” on Jews.

Trump insisted he did not recognize the high profile political activist backed by his own allies, GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Paul Gosar (Arizona). But witnesses reported that Trump had praised Fuentes at the dinner.

He also insisted that he was only giving advice to Ye, mostly on business. Ye was recently fired from several lucrative sponsorships following his anti-Semitic tweets and comments.

In another post on Truth Social, Trump later called Ye a “seriously troubled man.”

You claimed he asked Trump to be his vice president, and that Trump “yelled” at him over dinner. But Trump praised Fuentes as they dined together, according to reports.