Top Trump Advisor Invited a White Nationalist To His Birthday

By Sophie Weiner  |  August 22, 2018 | 1:55am
Trump Administration

Say what you want about the Trump administration, but you can’t deny that they’re consistent. Just earlier this week, Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie was fired after it was revealed he’d spoken at a white nationalist conference. Now, Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow has been outed for hosting one of the white nationalists who spoke at that conference in his home.

According to the Washington Post, Kudlow hosted Peter Brimelow in his Connecticut home for a birthday party held this week, the day after Beattie was let go. Brimelow runs the website Vdare.com, which publishes anti-immigrant zealotry. One post that he has republished every year since 2015 “questions the utility” of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Though Brimelow rejects the label of white nationalist himself, he acknowledged to the Harvard Crimson in 2016 that the website does “certainly publish a few writers I would regard as ‘white nationalist’ in that they stand up for whites just as Zionists, black nationalists do for Jews, blacks, etc.” The website is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in what would become the United States, and a symbol for white nationalists.

Kudlow told the Washington Post he’s known Brimelow “forever,” and yet he also claimed he didn’t know of Brimelow’s white nationalist views. “If I had known this, we would never have invited him,” Kudlow told the Post. “I’m disappointed and saddened to hear about it.” I guess Kudlow has never read his good pal’s website over the last 20 years.

From the Post:

Kudlow said that Brimelow’s views on immigration and race are “a side of Peter that I don’t know, and I totally, utterly disagree with that point of view and have my whole life. I’m a civil rights Republican.”
Kudlow said Brimelow, who also lives in Connecticut, has been “coming to my dinner parties for years,” but said “none of this other stuff has ever come up.”

Brimelow seems to disagree with this interpretation of events in a statement. “I’ve known Larry for nearly 40 years. I regard him as a personal friend. They knew my first wife, who died, and were most kind to Lydia when I remarried. We agreed to disagree on immigration long ago,” he said.

Brimelow later whined on Twitter about not being allowed to have friends.

The Post asked Kudlow how he would explain his interactions with Brimelow to Trump. He responded, “Just the way I explained it now, hiding nothing.”

 
Join the discussion...