Where Kanye West might go after pulling out of his pro-Donald Trump heel turn

He's started distancing himself from the president, but his support will follow him around until he addresses it

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It’s been a particularly tough few weeks for those of us who doggedly fight Kanye West’s corner and support his music no matter how much stupid stuff he might say outside of his albums. “I would have voted on Trump” Kanye - oceans away from the “George Bush doesn’t care about black people Kanye - lost us scores of good men and women who understandably defected in spite of Ye’s disclaimers about his hypothetical voting choice. Maybe the biggest controversy in a controversy-laden career, it will hang heavy over his next release and it will be interesting to see what his next move is, Kanye this week appearing to climb down from his Trump support by deleting his tweets about the new president.

Here are his options (though don’t rule out a surprise line of utilitarian kitchenware or something):

Blame his political vagaries on his recent mental health problems

I think a lot of people expected Kanye to come out of hospital and renounce Trump, talking publicly about his exhaustion and how he hadn't been thinking straight for some time. Instead, he went directly to Trump Tower and hung with the president in his penthouse. One trip to the hospital doesn't amount to being cured, of course, and it's possible he will still try and leave his Trump support behind with the issues he's working through, but he's made it pretty difficult now that his political alignment has proven to be not a snap outburst but a stance sustained over a period of weeks.

Try and explain himself in a standalone single

2017 is the enemy of depth and nuance, with opinions having to be distilled down to 140 (usually reductive) characters and qualifying statements in concert speeches getting missed because none of us can watch a video for longer than 12.5 seconds. As such, Kanye might drop a track that tackles the backlash head-on, reiterating that it was things like the political paradigm shift that he admired about Trump's campaign and not the man himself.

Say he doesn't support Trump now he's blatantly discriminating against people with the travel ban

Not really a tenable position, given the extreme measures Trump has taken since he got into office where all very much planned and outlined long before his election.

Try and explain himself less directly in a new album

Unlike Kendrick, Run the Jewels, Mos Def etc, Kanye isn't really one to put politics at the centre of a song, his tracks and albums tending to be collages of fragmented thoughts and ideas around different topics. Maybe he won't return with a song that overtly discusses the massive elephant in the room then, but bring it up as part of a wider project.

Never bring Trump up again

This is pretty unlikely - Kanye is nothing if not honest and his music is always personal - he must surely reference this event, which has divided not only his fans but his peers too and threatened to derail his career.

Issue a mea culpa

Wouldn't be unprecedented given he openly apologised for the whole Taylor Swift VMAs thing, plus he probably owes Jay Z and Beyoncé an apology anyway.

Just buddies up even closer to Trump and starts a new state-sponsored rival to Spotify and Tidal that pledges to melt an iceberg for every play

By this point nothing would surprise me.