Don Lemon Grills Jewish Trump-Era Official on Nick Fuentes Dinner: Do You Condemn Trump?

A former Trump official who says he is the descendant of Holocaust survivors still refuses to condemn the former president for meeting with a white supremacist and Holocaust denier.

Len Khodorkovsky, who served as Donald Trump’s deputy assistant secretary of state, told CNN Monday that he is “concerned with the mainstreaming of antisemitism wherever it comes from.”

But when host Don Lemon asked if he condemned Trump, Khodorkovsky froze.

“Do you condemn the former president for meeting with antisemites, for entertaining antisemites and antisemitism?” Lemon asked. He repeated versions of the same question over the course of the men’s 10-minute exchange.

Khodorkovsky insisted that Trump was not an antisemite and accused Lemon of trying to “make this all about Trump” instead of rising antisemitism.

“It is about Trump,” Lemon replied, clearly flabbergasted. “We’re talking about the former president meeting with an antisemite. How is this not about Trump?”

Trump met last week with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, as well as rapper Kanye West, another antisemite.

Trump falsely claimed he didn’t know Fuentes’s politics. Meanwhile, the Republican establishment has been largely silent on the matter, with only a select few condemning the meeting.

The Republican establishment has been largely silent in the week since former President Donald Trump met with dinner guest from hell white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and Vladimir Putin supporter, arrived Tuesday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate alongside rapper Kanye West, another outspoken antisemite.

Trump confirmed a few days later that he had a dinner meeting with both men. He claimed he didn’t know who Fuentes was, but he has previously retweeted a clip from Fuentes’s internet show. 

As of Monday morning, not a single member of the GOP leadership in Congress had condemned Trump’s meeting with Fuentes.

Some Republicans have spoken out against the meeting but have either been wishy-washy or avoided mentioning Trump by name. Representative James Comer said Trump merely “needs better judgment in who he dines with,” while RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel only said that white supremacy and neo-Nazism are “disgusting.”

Those who have explicitly called Trump out are not lawmakers in positions with much influence on the GOP at large.

Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both members of the House January 6 committee, were quick to condemn Trump, with Cheney calling the meeting “indefensible.” Unfortunately, both members are leaving Congress in January.

Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, rumored to be considering a 2024 presidential run, said Trump knew what he was doing when he met with Fuentes and warned against “empowering the extremes.”

But Representative Kevin McCarthy, who is the Republican nominee for speaker of the House, has remained silent, likely because condemning Trump risks alienating the former leader’s supporters still in Congress (speaking of empowering the extremes). McCarthy will need every vote he can get if he is to become speaker.

Despite a poor showing by MAGA candidates during the midterms, Trump still holds considerable sway in Congress. The GOP establishment seems to be souring on him, but they still need his support to present a unified front.

It is just over a week before the Georgia runoff election between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker. The fate of the Senate—whether it will remain a 50–50 Democratic majority by tie-break, or outright 51–49 Democratic advantage—is up in the air.

A typical candidate might rise to the occasion and maintain a strong, focused message. But not Walker, as the Warnock campaign’s latest ad notes. From his unintelligible rambling to his outright lying, Walker has left voters wondering: “Y’all serious about this, right?”

“Not only does it make no sense—I don’t even understand what he thinks he’s saying,” said one voter.

The ad, released Saturday, includes Walker rambling about how China gets all the “good air” while America has to clean up all the other air. “It’s all the same air,” another voter responds, exasperated. Each reaction more incredulous than the last.

Just as Warnock was able to contrast himself against a candidate rife with controversy and unlikability in Kelly Loeffler during his last Georgia Senate runoff, he is poised to do the same once more against Walker.

Walker is not only a serial liar, an alleged abuser, viciously transphobic, an ostensible puppet for the GOP, and a potential tax fraudster—he’s simply not a coherent person who can connect with voters in any meaningful sense beyond being a rubber stamp for Republicans and their unpopular policies.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has already pivoted to blaming Tuesday night’s mass shooting on the U.S. “mental health crisis,” despite pushing policies that would actually have a detrimental effect on mental health care.

Six people were killed and another four wounded when a gunman opened fire at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, Tuesday night. The shooting comes just a few days after an attack on a queer club in Colorado Springs, and less than two weeks after a shooting at the University of Virginia that left three students dead.

Youngkin, who has said he thinks there should be no gun safety measures in his state, has avoided saying the words “shooting” or “gun” when discussing any of the three most recent tragedies.

He said Wednesday that all three are “a moment to reflect on the state of mind of America and Virginia and this mental health crisis that we know we’re in the middle of.”

Mental health is often highlighted when looking for reasons behind a mass shooting, particularly among Republicans. But health experts say that doing so simplifies the circumstances that lead to such attacks. Meanwhile, widespread access to firearms and stalled gun legislation reform—most often the result of Republican opposition—are also to blame for mass shootings.

And to make matters worse, Republicans don’t actually seem to have a plan to address the mental health issues they’re so quick to cite after mass shootings.

Virginia’s latest budget, which Youngkin signed into effect in July, does include increased funding for mental health care, including start-up funding for a crisis response center and a pay raise for state and state-sponsored mental health workers.

But Youngkin’s proposed policies to roll back the rights of transgender students could have a devastating effect on teenage mental health statewide, experts say. He has also vocally opposed the expansion of Medicaid, which many rely on for mental health purposes.

In June, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law. The legislation, the first major gun reform bill in three decades, was also the biggest single expansion of mental health care in U.S. history since Obamacare and a huge expansion of Medicaid. Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, the bill’s main architect, said that Republicans had initially wanted to address mental health separately from gun safety, despite constantly linking the two.

Republicans have also been working constantly to gut Medicaid, as well as the Affordable Care Act, which was the single biggest expansion of mental health care when it passed.

Herschel Walker has lied about paying for a girlfriend’s abortion, about graduating in the top 1 percent of his college class (or graduating at all), about being a police officer, and much, much more. And now it seems like he’s lying about where he even lives.

The Georgia Senate candidate is receiving a 2022 tax break meant for Texas residents, reports CNN, potentially violating Texas tax rules and Georgia residency rules regarding voting or running for office. The revelation comes as Walker faces off against Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock in a December runoff election.

The Republican is set to receive a Texas homestead tax exemption in 2022—which someone can only take on their “principal residence.” A county tax assessor office told CNN that Walker took the tax break in 2021 as well, both breaks coming after he launched his candidacy for Senate in Georgia.

Before moving to Georgia to run for office, Walker had lived in a gated community near Dallas for over a decade. Georgia has 15 rules considered for establishing residency and eligibility to run for office—including where one accepts a homestead tax exemption.

The technical legality of Walker’s Senate campaign is therefore ambiguous. Not all 15 Georgia rules have to be followed in order to establish residency. Meanwhile, the Constitution only requires a Senate candidate to be an “inhabitant” of the state they run in.

Just as Mehmet Oz was attacked for being a New Jersey outsider running in a Pennsylvania Senate race, Walker’s legitimacy as a candidate is up for debate. Even if Walker’s candidacy is up to legal snuff, the perception of him simply acting as a carpetbagging vestige of the Republican Party risks his bid.

And it won’t be easy for Walker to shake that perception. Republicans literally walk Walker around from appearance to appearance, proudly describing how the Black candidate apparently serves as a tool for the party’s political ambitions. It’s hard not to see Walker as a Republican transplant just being used by the party to try winning an election.