Kanye do it?
( Well, if Trump can, anyone can)
He’s the billionaire rapper married to Kim Kardashian who is now running for president – and says he’ll base his White House on a superhero movie. So...
HE’S SAID he would run a White House inspired by a superhero movie and be a president who ‘follows the word of the Bible’. If you thought US politics couldn’t possibly get any more insane, steel yourself – how does President Kanye West and First Lady Kim Kardashian sound?
Following his bombshell announcement last weekend – on Twitter, naturally – that he is running for president this year, the eccentric billionaire rapper insisted on Tuesday that he was indeed serious about his political plans.
In a four-hour chat with the business magazine Forbes, which was often not so much rambling as completely unintelligible, West said he would be running under a new banner – the Birthday Party.
He envisages a White House based on Wakanda, the fictitious secret African country from the Marvel superhero film Black Panther, which has superadvanced technology.
His views on science, however, sound more medieval than futuristic. West, who contracted Covid-19 in February and who last year announced he had become a Christian, said a coronavirus vaccine would be ‘the mark of the beast’.
He appears to believe a widespread conspiracy theory that there is a sinister plot to insert microchips into people via the vaccine. ‘They want to do all kinds of things to make it where we can’t cross the gates of Heaven,’ he said.
He wants to ban the death penalty, reform the criminal justice system and ‘clean up’ the chemicals in deodorants and toothpaste, but admitted he hadn’t thought too much about areas such as taxation and foreign policy.
West said he has already chosen a running mate – Michelle Tidball, a ‘Biblical life coach’ from Cody, Wyoming, where the Wests have a 4,000-acre ranch. But given that she claims she never watches the news, some have speculated she may not even know she’s running.
There is, of course, a tradition of maverick billionaires making a run at the Oval Office, such as Ross Perot in 1992, and Michael Bloomberg earlier this year. Now, while West has been an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump, he says that he’s ready to run against him.
‘I am taking the red hat off, with this interview,’ he said in reference to Trump’s trademark red ‘Make America Great Again’ baseball cap, and admitted that he had lost confidence in The Donald.
‘It looks like one big mess to me,’ he said of Trump’s presidency, adding: ‘I don’t like that I caught wind that he hid in the bunker’ – a reference to reports that Trump was taken to a secure area during protests near the White House.
RUNNING for president is a tall order for anyone, but West told Forbes he was ‘one of the most powerful humans – I’m not saying the most because you got a lot of alien-level superpowers’. He said: ‘Like anything I’ve ever done, I’m [going] to win.’
West’s alarming pronouncements prompted yesterday’s report that his family is concerned he is ‘in the throes of a serious bipolar episode’ that has impaired his judgment.
But if that is the case, what was his wife doing retweeting his original election bid announcement, alongside a US flag emoji, to her 65.6million Twitter followers?
Tech billionaire Elon Musk also told West: ‘You have my full support!’, broadcasting this to his own 36.7million followers.
When you take into account West’s 29.4million Twitter followers, too, that’s an awfully wide reach – and we all know how far a big social media following took Donald Trump in 2016. That’s just one of the reasons why pundits caution that West’s political ambitions, no matter how flaky, shouldn’t be dismissed as a meaningless ego trip or publicity stunt – unlike those of socialite Paris Hilton, who on Tuesday said she is running for president under the slogan ‘Make America Hot Again’.
She promised to pick singer Rihanna as her running mate. She also posted Photoshopped pictures of herself lying on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office with the caption: ‘I’ve decided the Oval Office needs a woman’s touch.’ She, at least, is not serious.
So far, so utterly barmy. But people ought to consider that, if West does run, while he may have an almost equally negligible chance of winning as the hotel heiress, he could have a critical impact on the election by taking black votes away from Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden. Election forecaster Rachel Bitecofer said a West run would ‘not be an insignificant threat’ to Biden. ‘Celebrity is a major asset,’ she pointed out. West says he hates Democrat assumptions that black people must vote for them, and also that he’s happy to siphon off African-American votes, thus helping Trump. Like Trump, West – rapper, record producer, fashion designer, activist and entrepreneur – isn’t short on self-confidence. He is, after all, surpassed in his narcissism and hunger for attention only by his wife, who soared to fame with her sisters, Kourtney, Khloe, Kylie and Kendall, in the breathtakingly banal reality television series Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
West, who says he’s never voted in his life, has yet to file any of the necessary papers with the Federal Election Commission and has no campaign apparatus other than two advisers – his wife and Elon Musk. He says he will make a final decision on running within the next 30 days. By that time, he will be too late to get on the ballot in most states, but may rely on his supporters to write his name on to their ballots, which they can do.
Aged 43, West cannot be accused – as septuagenarians Trump and Biden have been – of going senile. However, many say he mislaid his marbles long ago.
Once the Bad Boy of Rap, he earned a reputation for doing anything for attention. In 2009 he stormed onto the stage as Taylor Swift collected a gong at the MTV Video Music Awards to complain it should have gone to Beyoncé.
Crediting his creative imagination to his bipolar condition – which he calls a ‘superpower’ – he’s compared himself to Jesus, Picasso and Apple creator Steve Jobs.
But, as a businessman, he has a golden touch. Like Trump, he wallows in his wealth, boasting that a deal with Adidas to produce ‘Yeezy’ trainers made him a
billionaire. Last month, shares in clothing giant Gap surged higher than they had in 40 years after it revealed a partnership with West.
The rapper clearly doesn’t see shameless materialism as any bar to godliness. Last year, he underwent what he called a ‘spiritual awakening’. He wrote a Christian opera, and started staging ‘Sunday Services’, travelling Gospel services with a 120-strong choir which performs in monk-like robes, gold pendants and Yeezy trainers.
WEST and his wife have already dipped their expensively manicured toes into politics by working with Trump on the release of prisoners and criminal justice reform.
West donned a red ‘Make America Great Again’ hat for a boisterous meeting with Trump in 2018. He and Trump are both ‘dragon energy’, he’s said.
He’s hardly endeared himself to America’s liberal establishment – particularly its African-American contingent – with his support for Trump and his history of making politically incorrect remarks. He recently declared slavery was ‘a choice’, for instance.
If the prospect of West as president sounds daunting, the thought of his wife as first lady is terrifying. Although she says she’s training as a civil rights lawyer, she regularly treats social media followers to pictures of her famously ample buttocks. She reportedly once gave her husband a sculpture of them. It might look perfect in a Kanye West Oval Office, but none of this exactly screams ‘White House’.
‘I have to say with all humility that as a man, I don’t have all of the pieces in the puzzle,’ West told Forbes of his presidential bid. The moment he gets them all is when America has to worry.