Trump Admin Refused to Comment on the Record About Nick Fuentes ‘Out of Fear’ of Attacks by His Online Fans, NY Times Reports

Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News via AP, File

A new article by The New York Times profiling Nick Fuentes revealed that the Trump administration refused to comment on the record “out of fear” of attacks from the 27-year-old white nationalist’s followers.

Fuentes has a conflicted history with President Donald Trump, initially loudly cheerleading his 2016 campaign and infamously joining the president and Kanye West for dinner at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022 for what was reportedly a warm conversation — but then more recently attacking the president for not being extreme enough.

The report by Robert Draper describes how other right-wing influencers viewed Fuentes as a “mosquito-like interloper mosquito-like interloper whose lifeblood was attention” — annoying but a problem that would “flitter off into oblivion” on his own if he were ignored. Instead, wrote Draper, Fuentes seemed to be growing in influence during Trump’s second term:

But today an entirely different consensus has emerged on the right. The footprint of the oratorically proficient late-night streaming show host has not dwindled in the least, with his tens if not hundreds of thousands of alienated young male conservatives followers known as Groypers, a nickname derived from an alt-right meme. If anything, his anti-Israel, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender and anti-civil-rights views seem to have gained new currency during the second Trump administration.

There is now growing alarm among leading conservatives about Mr. Fuentes, who routinely tests the cultlike devotion of his young male fans by savaging their patriarchal figure, President Trump, for not being right-wing enough. In the process, he has emerged as one of the loudest voices on the right to turn on the president.

Among Fuentes’ gripes with Trump are the president’s stances on the war in Gaza, the Epstein files, and a potential extension of student visas for Chinese students.

Despite Fuentes being unable thus far to “demonstrate that he can shape American politics on an electoral level,” and his years of openly racist, antisemitic, and misogynistic rhetoric getting him banned from major conservative conferences like CPAC and social media platforms like YouTube, the White House nonetheless ducked questions from the Times for the article, citing their worries about Fuentes and his online followers attacking them.

“Asked to comment on Mr. Fuentes’s remarks, White House officials declined,” reported the Times. “Current and former members of the Trump administration as well as outside advisers would not be quoted for the record about Mr. Fuentes out of fear, they said, of inviting online attacks from him and his zealous followers. Three of them mentioned the sudden ubiquity of Fuentes-related clips circulating in their social media feeds.”