Donald Trump's campaign is putting new protocols in place to ensure that those who meet with the former president are approved and fully vetted.
According to people familiar with the plans, the changes are in acknowledgment of the backlash over Trump's dinner with Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist.
The changes will include expediting a system, borrowed from Trump's White House, in which a senior campaign official will be with him at all times, the Associated Press reported.
Trump has said that he did not know Fuentes before the meeting and suggested that had Fuentes expressed his views during their "very quick dinner," it "wouldn't have been accepted," Fox News Digital reported.
"The meeting was uneventful," he said.
Fuentes himself said it seemed like Trump didn't know who he was.
"Certainly he didn't know I was me when I arrived at the dinner, and I didn't mean for my statements and my whole background to sort of become a public relations problem for the president," he said.
Fuentes arrived at at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in a car with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West who recently made headlines and lost lucrative business deals over antisemitic comments, and was waved into the club by security, even though only Ye had been on the security list, the AP reported.
News of the meeting, which came a week after Trump announced his third presidential campaign, drew quick criticism from Republican rivals and his own allies, many of whom questioned how Fuentes was able to access the club and why nobody seemed aware of his presence or warned Trump against meeting with him, per the AP.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lashed out at the former president.
"There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism or White supremacy, and anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, are highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States," he said.
Trump swifty fired back at McConnell, calling him "a loser for our nation and for the Republican Party who would not have been re-elected in Kentucky without my endorsement."
Mitt Romney also slammed Trump for the dinner, comparing him to a "gargoyle" hanging over the Republican party and saying he will drive away potential voters.
"There is no bottom to the degree to which he's willing to degrade himself, and the country for that matter," Romney said.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also criticized the meeting but offered Trump some defense.
"I don't think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party," McCarthy said to media at the White House, per Fox News. "I condemn his ideology. It has no place in society."
The California Republican added that Trump had come out "four times and condemned" Fuentes, and insisted Trump "didn't know who he was."
Former Vice President Mike Pence said he doesn't believe Trump is an antisemite, a racist or a bigot, but that he should apologize for the dinner.
"I think the president demonstrated profoundly poor judgment in giving those individuals a seat at the table," he told NewsNation. "I think he should apologize for it and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification."
Pence added that "people often forget that the president's daughter converted to Judaism, his son-in-law is a devout Jew, his grandchildren are Jewish."
Trump addressed the dinner in a Nov. 25 post on Truth Social.
"Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was asking me for advice concerning some of his difficulties, in particular having to do with his business. 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,'" he wrote. "Anyway, we got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on Tucker Carlson. Why wouldn’t I agree to meet? Also, I didn't know Nick Fuentes."
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