Ye, the widely-condemned artist formerly known as Kanye West, had dinner recently with former President Donald Trump and a well-known white nationalist.
It apparently did not go well.
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In a bizarre video with infamous right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos posted Thursday night, Ye (who changed his name in 2021) discussed the dinner he had with Trump at the former president’s Mar-A-Lago stronghold. Also dining with them was Nicholas Fuentes, an influential far-right podcaster that the Department of Justice described as a white supremacist.
Ye, who has been been on an antisemitic spiral in recent months, announced he is going to be running for president in 2024, and Yiannopoulos is his campaign manager. He claimed that he asked the former president to run with him as his vice-president. According to Ye, the dinner involving the billionaire, the rapper, and the white nationalist devolved into screaming and derogatory epithets.
“Trump started basically screaming at me at the table, telling me I’m going to lose. Has that ever worked for anyone in history?” Ye claimed as Yiannopoulos, who has interned for far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, agreed with him. “Hold up Trump, you’re talking to Ye.”
Trump, who has long denied the results of the 2020 election, recently announced his own bid for the presidency in 2024. On Truth Social, Trump’s Twitter competitor, the former president said that he was scheduled to have dinner with only Ye but the rapper “unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about.” He only said the dinner happened but was “quick and uneventful” and has yet to respond to Ye’s recent claims.
“I think the thing Trump was most perturbed about was me asking him to be my vice-president,” Ye said, who claimed that he asked Trump why he “didn’t free the January 6ers.” He also claimed that Trump then told him a “mob-esque” story about how he pardoned Alice Johnson, a woman who Kim Kardashian (Ye’s ex-wife) had rallied to be released from prison, to try and impress the rapper and then called Kardashian a derogatory term.
In a flurry of Thursday night posts, Ye revealed his logo for his campaign and several campaign videos (focused on companies cutting ties with him.)
Continuing his habit of bringing far-right trolls into his orbit, he has also seemingly brought on board Fuentes and indicated the white nationalist is helping with the campaign. A right-wing blog friendly with those in Ye’s orbit reported Fuentes was in line to be the campaign’s communication director. In the video, Ye said that Trump was “very impressed” with Fuentes.
Yiannopoulos took to Telegram (as he has been banned from pretty much every other social media platform) to write about how excited he was to be working with Ye. He wrote that both Fuentes was on board via a “fraternal and intellectual alliance” as well as former Trump 2016 strategist Karen Giorno. The far-right as a whole is celebrating Ye as both a savior and a tool for their cause.
The rapper is in the midst of a vicious downward spiral that includes antisemitic remarks including saying he was going to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” harassing his ex-wife and her partners, being kicked off (then reinstated) on Twitter, and a plethora of other dysfunctional activities. This spiral has seen him dropped by sponsors like Adidas and Gap.
The embattled rapper has long hinted about a foray into politics but has never fully committed. In the 2020 election, he was on the ballot in twelve different states but only received a total of 60,000 votes. His highest vote percentage was in Idaho where he received 0.4 percent of the vote.
Meanwhile, a recent investigation by Rolling Stone describes just how dysfunctional he can be as a boss. The outlet reported that he would show porn and his own sex tapes to his employees and bully them at Adidas. In an open letter, employees described the rapper as creating a “toxic and chaotic environment” who displayed a “sick pattern of predacious behavior toward women.”