What lessons did candidate Donald Trump take away from his disastrous meeting with Kanye West, the grandstanding rapper who without informing Trump dragged along embittered provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and the Jew-baiting online guttersnipe Nick Fuentes? What can we learn, strategically, as we fight to save our nation from the Gadarene elites who seek to drown us all in the sea?

Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. I’m appalled that we have to ask these questions. But here we are.

I was tempted, as a literary exercise, to write up the lessons I hope Donald Trump might have learned and put it in his own voice, as a light-hearted parody of his own blunt Queens style of blurting out what he thinks, without any filter. (Instead of, you know, my own blunt Queens style of blurting out what I think, without any filter.) And that would have been fun, even amusing, while still instructive.

No Gallows Humor, Thanks, Just Gallows Please

But the time for such joking has passed. Our politics stopped being funny when the Democrats stole the election and decided to imprison any Americans who protested it. It would take the gallows humor that kept men sane in Stalin’s Moscow to quip about America right now. And I don’t have that in me. I’m fresh out of humor. I just want to set up some gallows.

I don’t want to come across as if I’m mocking the former president, at a moment when every opportunistic center-right hack in the Anglosphere is piling on Trump, hoping it will get them “uncancelled.” Or hired by some Rupert Murdoch-owned media entity. Or noticed by the Koch brothers and recruited for some fat, happy thinktank based in Old Town, Alexandria. A (monkey) pox on all of them. I’ll leave such antics to the Vichy-Con hacks at National Review.

How Did the Addams Family Trainwreck Come About? It Was Set Up That Way

In my last column on this grotesque incident, I wondered aloud what could possibly have happened to produce such a trainwreck, of the kind that Gomez Addams used to engineer with his own model railroads. (To lift your spirits, here are 10 minutes and 41 seconds of Addams crashing his trains. You’re welcome.)

And in the hours since I wrote it, we found out exactly what happened, thanks to Marc Caputo, a diligent journalist who believes telling the truth is more important than maximally savaging Mr. Trump. Caputo here proves himself an admirable exception in his corrupt profession. Please go read every word of his detailed account based on insiders dishing the dirt. It will allow you to fully appreciate the challenges Trump faces within his very own movement. I’ll just quote the most crucial passages, and then offer the lesson that I hope we (and Trump) can take away from each facet of this catastrophe.

Lesson #1: Kanye West Is a Malignant Narcissist Who Offers Us Nothing

Caputo reports:

Just two days before Thanksgiving, Donald Trump was planning to have a private, uneventful dinner with an old friend: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. … But Trump may have been walking into a trap in Mar-a-Lago’s gilded halls — one that leveraged his own penchant for spectacle and showmanship against him. Ye arrived with three guests, including white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes.

Trump has since said he didn’t know Fuentes or his background when they dined together, a claim Fuentes confirmed in an interview, but others at the crowded members-only club figured out his identity.

Okay, let’s stop right there, at the very top of the story. This NBC News reporter confirmed, straight from the jackass’s mouth and from Trump’s, that Trump didn’t know Nick Fuentes from Adam Sandler.

If this were Barack Obama, and Fuentes merely a black nationalist who wanted to organize a genocide of white people, the narrative would have ended right there. NBC would have run a very short report confirming that “the president had no way of knowing Mr. Fuentes’ identity or views,” and was the victim of “a mistake on the part of his staff.” In case that wasn’t sufficient, it would have run multiple commentaries accusing Republicans of “pouncing,” perhaps because of their own secret  racial animus. The story would have fallen down the same memory hole that swallowed all those pictures of Obama meeting with Louis Farrakhan.

We also learn from this that Kanye West is a callous, treacherous blowhard whom no one should trust in any context or for any reason. He violated the most basic and ancient rule of civilized human conduct, which is that a host doesn’t harm his guest, and a guest doesn’t poison his host. I don’t care how loud West screams “Jesus!” in his next self-aggrandizing album. This is sub-pagan behavior, which would have outraged the Homeric Greeks.

Lesson #2: Trump Should Be Paying Personally the Legal Bills for Every J6 Defendant

But West was right about one thing he told Trump, and I’ve got to hand it to the man for being bold enough to say it. Caputo reports: “Ye criticized Trump for not doing enough to help pay the legal bills of those arrested in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.”

Absolutely right. If Trump were really the leader he wants us to think of him as, he would have sent Alan Dershowitz in a Trump-owned helicopter to land in D.C. and represent each of the January 6 defendants at Trump’s personal expense. (Not including the FBI spooks, of course.) Instead of raising hundreds of millions to “stop the steal,” money which just disappeared, and leaving the J6 dissidents as high and dry as the graduates of Trump University. That’s hard to forgive — and for now, impossible, in light of Trump’s lack of repentance.

Lesson #3 Celibate or Not, Milo Yiannopoulos Is Still an Insufferable, Spoiled Bratty Queen

Caputo reports:

As advisers to Trump have attempted to quell the backlash, some have insisted that the former president was essentially tricked by the rapper and his guests — a suspicion backed up by Milo Yiannopoulos, the anti-Trump, far-right provocateur who is now acting as a political adviser to Ye.

…

Yiannopoulos … told NBC News that he was ‘the architect’ of the plan to have Fuentes travel with Ye in the hopes of slipping him into the dinner with Trump. The intent, according to Yiannopoulos, was for Fuentes to give Trump an unvarnished view of how a portion of his base views his candidacy.

‘I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end,’ he added.

And, Yiannopoulos said, he arranged the dinner ‘just to make Trump’s life miserable’ because news of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it.

Fuentes echoed the sentiment: “I hate to say it, but the chickens are coming home to roost. You know, this is the frustration with his base and with his true loyalists.”

(Fuentes is a such a Trump loyalist that he promptly endorsed Ron DeSantis on the Internet, but who really cares what Nick Fuentes thinks?)

Caputo quoted conservative commentator Laura Loomer, who spoke of “Milo’s multiyear, anti-Trump posts since 2020 and his self-proclaimed desire to get a vengeance on President Donald Trump.”

Like Oscar Wilde, Minus the Talent

I never understood why Milo Yiannopoulos was famous in the first place. Nor did it make sense how he got cancelled suddenly and absolutely, for making a bitter crack about male same-sex predators, of the kind who molested him as a teen, and helped make him the man that he is.

When Milo was still a media phenomenon, he was cruel and snarky and sickening to watch, for those of us who don’t appreciate drag queen humor. Then he fell and fell hard, much harder than he deserved. He was easy to pity at that point, I guess, and to rally to him as a fellow victim of the left. Then Milo announced to anyone who would listen that he’d returned to his Catholic faith and embraced Christian chastity.

That may well be true. But he clearly hasn’t mastered charity, honesty, or justice. He cares far more about the personal slights and wrongs he believes he suffered than about the fate of his adopted country. This drama queen feels betrayed, it seems, that Trump didn’t swoop in and rescue him after his own media house of cards collapsed. So now he’s willing to sabotage Trump’s campaign via deceit, just to get another few minutes of notoriety.

Hey Milo, why don’t you ponce off back to Britain, and sabotage its patriotic candidates?

Lesson #4 The Populist Right Has No Institutions, so it Rises or Falls on Self-Made Media Figures — Some of Whom Are Toxic Head Cases

The establishment “conservative movement” has deep pockets, thanks to clueless or lazy donors. So it has dozens of plum jobs to hand out each year to young writers who can make the best “conservative case” for … drag queen story hours, or mass Muslim immigration, or gun confiscation. Those of us actually attached to real conservative, Christian principles have very few homes indeed. (I’m deeply grateful for The Stream!)

Instead of an organized movement that identifies, trains and advances responsible, talented spokesmen, we have the crazy lottery of online self-promotion, which tends to favor the loudest, meanest, or “edgiest” commentator. Such people tend to be reckless, or stupid, or hateful, or a creative blend of the three.

Unless we fix this last problem, our future is bleak indeed. We’re condemned to an endless Halloween parade of Yiannopoulos and Fuentes types, who in fact deserve their exile in the fever swamps where our elites would consign fully half of our country.

Some people really are deplorable, in the pre-Clinton sense of the word.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”