MSNBC host Joy Reid was hard-pressed this week to understand why Republicans have been denouncing Nick Fuentes after his dinner with Donald Trump because, she said to Kurt Bardella, the white nationalist anti-Semite really isn’t fundamentally different from the standard GOP.
Reid spoke with Democrat strategist Bardella on Tuesday about the already infamous dinner that has set Trump’s world spinning. Kanye West brought white supremacist Fuentes with him to have dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and the aftermath has spiraled to the point that GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) came close to explicitly calling it disqualifying for the party’s 2024 nomination.
But, Reid said, the rationale is hard to track. She played a clip of Fuentes talking on a podcast, at the end of which he he said, “we need to take control the media, or take control the government and force the people to believe what we believe.”
“So you had Kurt, you know, some people come out and say, well, that’s horrible, you know, and say he’s a terrible person,” Reid began. “They don’t want to talk about Trump. They say, but Trump’s not an anti-Semite. They carve out of that. Trump is not a bad guy. He shouldn’t have had him at the table.”
While many Republicans have denounced the dinner to varying degrees and even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made a sad effort distance herself from Fuentes, there are not many Republican or conservative figures saying definitively they will vote for a Democrat in 2024 if Trump wins the nomination.
Reid argued that the reason is the party mirrors what Fuentes believes, and cited among her examples the pro-life movement, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) two years ago arguing, mostly accurately, that the United States is a constitutional republic rather than a straight, majority-rule democracy. She also referenced Trump’s continuing desperate insistence he won in 2020 despite not having won in 2020.
“The problem is, the rest of what Fuentes just said — to me, that doesn’t sound any different than fundamentally what the party platform is,” said Reid. “They don’t believe in elections. They don’t necessarily like the idea of democracy. Mike Lee said democracy is a bad idea. They don’t like the idea of women controlling their bodies. They clearly wouldn’t mind having a dictator because they don’t think that elections matter. They think they should just decide who the president of the United States is. They hate the culture. They’re angry that the culture is too friendly to LGBTQ people.
“I just I see a very small degree of difference between what he believes and what they believe. I just don’t see it,” said Reid.
Bardella agreed of course, and added that Republicans are White.
“I think this is the reason why you’ve seen for days now, Republicans kind of tripping over themselves, trying to figure out how do we talk about this? How do we talk about this in a way that doesn’t scare away the base of people that represent really their core constituency at this point.” he said. “The Republican party is a White party and they traffic in white nationalistic policy.”
Watch the clip above, via MSNBC.
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