Kanye West has dished how Donald Trump allegedly screamed at him and warned the rapper he “would lose” if he embarked upon a presidential campaign during his visit to the White House and meeting with the then-POTUS in October 2018.
The revelation, along with a batch of others, comes in a two-minute 2024 campaign promo video that the 45-year-old rap artist, record producer, and fashion designer, whose legal name is now Ye, posted on Twitter after he was unblocked from the platform on November 20.
Titled Mar-a-Lago debrief, one of the videos shows the owner of the Yeezy clothing brand saying:
“When Trump started basically screaming at the table telling me I was gonna lose, I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history? I’m like, ‘wait, hold on Trump, you’re talking to Ye.'"
According to the rap sensation and multiple Grammy Award winner, "the thing that Trump was most perturbed about [was] me asking him to be my vice president... I think that was, like, lower on the list of things that caught him off guard."
The artist also stated in the clip that he "walked in with intelligence" at the time as "someone who loves Trump," and advised the 45th US president to listen more to his "loyalists."
"He basically gives me this would-be mob-esque kind of story of all that he went through to get Alice Johnson out of jail and that he did not do it for Kim [Kardashian] but he did it for me," Ye added in the promo.
The reference at this point was made to a first-time nonviolent drug offender whose sentence Trump commuted after Kim Kardashian had pleaded her case.
Kanye West also claimed that Donald Trump "insulted" his then-wife Kim Kardashian, allegedly telling the artist, “you can tell her I said that,” with the purportedly disparaging comment bleeped in the clip.
“I was thinking, like, that’s the mother of my children,” Kanye West said of the socialite and businesswoman, whom he split with in March 2022.
FILE - Kim Kardashian West, left, and Kanye West arrive at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Feb. 9, 2020
© AP Photo / Evan Agostini
On July 4, 2020, West, no stranger to controversial and provocative statements, dropped the bombshell announcement that he would run for president in the election, although the move was taken with a pinch of salt. West eventually conceded his campaign on November 4, 2020, after garnering around 70,000 votes in the 12 states where he had qualified for ballot access.
The rapper, who has struggled with bipolar disorder and was even placed on a psychiatric hold in LA in 2016, announced not long ago that he had plans to run for president again in 2024. In a recent video interview with a US media outlet during a visit to one of Ye's ateliers, a cameraman questioned him if he was going to run for the top office in 2024, eliciting a simple "Yes" from the artist.
The news comes as last month, Adidas and several other brands severed ties with the rapper amid claims that he had made "antisemitic remarks." Twitter banned his account on October 9 for a policy violation, although the platform itself did not specify the exact reason for the suspension. In recent months, Ye has appeared to be on a roll, issuing one provocative rant after another on social media and in interviews. In one tweet, the 45-year-old rapper and fashion mogul wrote that he was going to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”