Dinner at Hate for Donald Trump, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West

It doesn’t sound like the kind of company that might be conjured when celebrities are asked in a glossy magazine interview to name their ideal dinner-party guests from history. The answer is invariably some combination of

Jesus Christ,

Julius Caesar,

Eleanor Roosevelt

and Mozart. But we would surely be lying if we didn’t acknowledge a desire to have been a fly on the wall at the feast, or perhaps at least to have had access to one of those listening devices that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has presumably installed in all the salt cellars of the fabled mansion.

Mr. Trump subsequently played innocent about the occasion. He told his tens of millions of followers on Truth Social that Mr. West had asked for the meeting, seeking the former president’s help with some of his difficulties, “in particular having to do with his business,” and had brought along a guest with whom Mr. Trump was wholly unfamiliar.

“We also discussed, to a lesser extent, politics, where I told him he should definitely not run for President, ‘any voters you may have should vote for TRUMP.’ Anyway, we got along great,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. West. “He expressed no anti-Semitism. . . . Why wouldn’t I agree to meet? Also, I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”

This is, on its face, entirely plausible. Mr. Fuentes, for all his noxious efforts at self-publicity, hasn’t exactly broken into the wider public consciousness outside the small community of American fascists. Mr. West’s career trajectory does look as though it could benefit from some input from a seriously successful businessman-turned-president. Above all, there is something very credible about the idea that the meeting might have been mainly an opportunity for the former president to attempt a pre-emptive cancellation of a rival campaign.

Other accounts of the gathering, however, differ slightly from the former president’s recollection. Mr. West said that Mr. Trump had been “very impressed” with Mr. Fuentes, whom the rapper described as a Trump “loyalist.” Someone familiar with the event told Axios that Mr. Trump had listened approvingly as Mr. Fuentes offered advice, notably that the former president should revert to being “authentic” because his supporters liked it when he was unrestrained rather than the scripted candidate who read words off a teleprompter as he had carefully done in the announcement of his presidential intentions earlier this month.

What are we to make of all this? Despite some predictable media hyperventilation, it doesn’t sound like a re-enactment of the Wannsee Conference. I for one don’t believe for a second that Mr. Trump is an anti-Semite, though he does seem to entertain other prejudices that presumably meet with Mr. Fuentes’s approval.

But publicly breaking bread with a white supremacist and a black fantasist has meaning and consequences.

Part of it presumably just represents Mr. Trump’s limitless capacity for hearing people tell him things he wants to hear—whoever they are.

Part of it surely is his perceived need for a continuing association with the ugliest elements of the American political spectrum. There’s some alarm in the fever swamps of the far right that, perhaps chastened by this month’s midterm election setbacks, Mr. Trump may be going a little soft and insufficiently supportive of their conspiracy theories. Letting it be known how impressed he is with Mr. Fuentes surely helps there.

But a significant part of it, I suspect, is simply Mr. Trump’s eagerness to push the boundaries of acceptable political behavior. It is central to the man’s unique appeal. He has been doing it since he first announced for president more than seven years ago, saying a succession of unsayable things about Mexicans,

John McCain

and virtually the entire Republican Party.

On a vast ocean of falsehoods, Mr. Trump has floated one indestructible truth—his line about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not losing any voters. We are about to discover whether that essential verity still holds, or whether, perhaps, finally people are just starting to tire of the whole unending, enervating circus.