Rapper and designer Kanye West, who ran a failed presidential bid during the 2020 election, is setting his sights on 2024 and claimed he asked former President Donald Trump to be his running mate.
“I think the thing that Trump was most perturbed about — me asking him to be my vice president,” the rapper, who now goes by Ye, said in a video uploaded to Twitter Thursday night. The video coincides with multiple outlets reporting that Ye had met with the former president earlier this week at Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, but the former president has yet to comment publicly on whether the meeting happened.
The video tagged the location of the Ye interview as “YEEZY HQ” in Los Angeles, California, and served as a debrief from the rapper’s alleged meeting with Trump.
“I think that was, like, lower on the list of things that caught him off guard,” Ye said of his request for Trump to be his vice president. “It was the fact that I walked in with intelligence.”
ADIDAS INVESTIGATING CLAIMS KANYE WEST ‘BULLIED’ EMPLOYEES AND FORCED THEM TO WATCH PORNOGRAPHY
#YE24 pic.twitter.com/DyIhMU5By6
— ye (@kanyewest) November 25, 2022
Separate videos emerged online Tuesday showing Ye walking at an airport in Miami with Nick Fuentes, a prominent alt-right figurehead and white nationalist. Ye also tweeted about meeting Trump and said he asked the 45th president to be his running mate.
The pair were also seen together at Trump’s Florida resort, according to Politico and the Daily Beast. A source also told the latter outlet that while Ye had dinner with Trump Tuesday, Fuentes was not present for that meeting.
Fuentes has had his accounts banned from multiple social media outlets and hosts an online show called “America First with Nicholas Fuentes,” in which he has been known to make racist and antisemitic remarks and has a fan base known as “Groypers.”
Groypers are described as being “a loose network of alt-right figures who are vocal supporters of white supremacist and ‘America First’ podcaster Nick Fuentes,” according to the Anti-Defamation League’s website.
The America First host is also known for his participation in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, which turned violent after a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi drove his vehicle into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman, and injuring 35 people. Fuentes was also present during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Ye has stirred controversy in recent weeks after making antisemitic outbursts on social media and in interviews, leading to many of his major corporate collaborations being terminated.
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In 2020, he was able to get on the ballot in some states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, but only garnered about 60,000 votes out of an estimated total of 160 million, per the BBC.
Ye indicated his plans for another run in a future presidential cycle in an October interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, saying, “I will be president one day.”
