American rapper Kanye West announces presidential bid
WASHINGTON: American rapper and entertainment mogul Kanye West has said he’s running for president. It’s not clear if the musician is serious, or if this is a publicity stunt for himself or a project unrelated to the presidency.
West’s Saturday night Twitter post instantly went viral, with more than 100,000 retweets within the first hour.
West has 29.4 million followers on Twitter. ‘Kanye’ quickly became the number one trending term on Twitter in the US.
If West is serious, there is a long list of hurdles toward running that would be nearly insurmountable for most candidates, including starting a campaign from scratch in July of an election year.
He would need to qualify for ballot access across 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as build a presidential-grade political organisation from scratch without the support of a party infrastructure.
At the moment, West doesn’t appear to have filed forms with the Federal Election Commission to run for office, according to a Bloomberg review of FEC data.
West, 43, has talked about running for president for years, and last year told an audience he’d run for president in 2024.
He and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, have worked with President Donald Trump a number of times including on the release of prisoners. West donned a red “Make America Great
Again” hat for a meeting with Trump in the Oval Office in 2018.
In 2019, during an interview with Zane Lowe of Apple Music’s Beats 1 show, he said his support for Trump had been a way to tease Democrats - and announced his own presidential ambitions.
“There will be a time when I will be the president of the US, and I will remember... any founder that didn’t have the capacity to understand culturally what we were doing.” It was unclear to whom the artist was referring.
Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who previously supported former Democratic candidate Andrew Yang, quickly said he was on board.
“You have my full support!” he responded to West’s tweet.