Before venturing inside the notorious Star Wars Cantina, Obi-Wan Kenobi sought to prepare us: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy!”

Oh yeah? Never? How about Donald Trump and his dinner companions?

Here’s what I don’t get: The guy has long boasted that he knows more than anyone else about ISIS, banking, tax laws, technology, infrastructure, renewables, windmills, science, drones, polls, courts (“I comprehend very well, OK? Better than, I think, almost anybody”)…yet, last Tuesday night, he supposedly had no idea who he was dining with and no interest in finding out.

Kanye “Ye” West, the self-publicized anti-Semite, showed up on Tuesday night with a mystery guest who was not on the invite list. The mystery guest was waved in anyway. Apparently there’s no advance vetting and no Secret Service screening down there in Trump’s Florida sinkhole – and that’s a story until itself, since the joint was a depository for stolen classified documents. The guest was introduced to Trump only as “Nick,” which was good enough for Trump.

Wouldn’t you think that a former president of the United States who had just announced a third bid might want a wee bit more information about “Nick” before passing the salt? Like, maybe asking the guest a simple question: “Who are you?” Or maybe Googling a little? Because it would’ve taken minimal effort to learn that “Nick,” aka Nick Fuentes, is a budding superstar in extremist media, captured on video saying stuff like this: “The Jews had better start being nice to people like us, because what comes out of this is going to get a lot uglier for them.” And stuff like this: “I piss on your Talmud. Jews, get the fuck out of America.”

Trump, in a subsequent message on social media, referred to Fuentes merely as “a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.” So, at best, the GOP’s only official ’24 presidential candidate is presenting himself as dumber than a box of rocks. But hey, even if Trump had known or at least had intuited that he was breaking bread with a Nazi, he likely would’ve been fine with that – because, as we’ve now learned, Fuentes sucked up to Trump and said Trump was his hero.

And that’s what matters to Trump, that’s the bottom line. At this low point he’ll welcome anyone who’s willing to feed his bottomless neediness. It was the same deal with Kanye West. It mattered not a whit that West has been railing about the Jews; all that mattered, as Trump wrote Friday on social media, was this: “I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on ‘Tucker Carlson’. Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?”

Nowhere on any of Trump’s post-dinner messages – he has tried four times to defend himself – has he even once denounced Fuentes and West for their anti-Semitic idiocies. In message #4, posted last night, Trump merely referred to West as “a seriously troubled man…who has always been good to me.” Doesn’t that bring a tear to your eye?

But what’s arguably most despicable – and tiresomely predictable – is that not a single Republican leader has mustered the wherewithal to condemn Trump’s feckless villainy. Gregg Nunziata, an attorney and former Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, asked on Twitter, “Is it the holiday timing, controversy exhaustion, or the fact that Florida Man is old news that explains a leading presidential candidate dining with a leading Nazi sympathizer prompts relatively muted reactions?”

No, it’s not the “timing.” It’s not the “exhaustion.” It’s not any belief that Trump is “old news.” It’s simply the fact that – even now, after a third successive Trump-albatross election, and with potential indictments on the horizon – elected Republican leaders like Kevin McCarthy are still terrified about alienating the various freaks, dolts, and bigots that populate so much of the party base.

One notable exception, on CNN this morning, was Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who was willing to go out on a limb and say that dining with a Nazi should be a no-no: “When you meet with people (like that), you empower them. That’s what you have to avoid…You’ve got to be absolutely clear in your communication that (anti-Semitism )is not acceptable. You have to disavow it, it’s as simple as that.”

But I suppose we should look in the bright side. As far as we know, West and Fuentes weren’t served classified documents for dessert.