A senior official needs to be with Trump at all times after the dinner scandal with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West, per new campaign rules: AP
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
- Trump's team has a new rule: A senior official needs to be with Trump at all times, the AP reports.
- The team is also putting in place a vetting process for all of Trump's guests, per the AP.
- This comes after the backlash to Trump's dinner with rapper Kayne West and white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Former President Donald Trump's team is putting new measures in place to try to reduce the number of scandals he gets into, per the Associated Press.
A senior official from the Trump campaign will accompany the former president at all times, a source familiar with the plans told the AP. In addition, the Trump 2024 campaign is also planning to vet and approve every single person who meets with Trump.
The measures come after Trump had dinner with rapper Kanye West, who now goes by the name Ye, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago on November 22.
Fuentes marched in the 2017 white supremacist "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, during which an avowed neo-Nazi drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman and injuring 35 people. The Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, describes Fuentes as a leader of the "Groyper Army." This is a loosely organized alt-right group that espouses pro-white, racist, and anti-Semitic views.
In a statement to Axios, Trump said he did not know who Fuentes was, or what his views were before the dinner. And in several posts on Truth Social, Trump called Ye a "seriously troubled man, who happens to be Black." He denied that he knew Fuentes or Ye's other companions who joined them at the dinner.
Trump's team is also claiming, per NBC, that Ye tricked the former president into meeting with Fuentes. Several sources close to Trump told NBC the dinner was a real blow to the Trump camp.
"This is a fucking nightmare," an anonymous longtime Trump adviser told NBC. "If people are looking at DeSantis to run against Trump, here's another reason why."
The former president has drawn backlash from within the GOP over the dinner.
Former GOP governor Chris Christie, a one-time Trump ally turned critic, on Friday called the meeting "another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump" and a sign that Trump is an "untenable general election candidate." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday blasted Trump's meeting with Ye and Fuentes, saying that there is "no room" in the GOP for white supremacy.
A representative for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on the campaign's new rules.