Is Kanye West’s 2024 presidential bid really that far-fetched?

The rap star’s presidential run was nothing short of disastrous – will 2024 be any different? Don’t write him off just yet, writes Chris Horrie. After four years of Trump, surely anything is possible

The rap star at the MTV Awards in 2015, shortly after God had reportedly contacted him in the shower to tell him to run for president (Getty)

Kanye West’s announcement of the launch of his 2024 presidential election campaign on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast recently was met with widespread derision. His 2020 campaign was drawing to a close and he had managed to garner only a farcical 60,000 votes in an electorate of 150 million. He had no track record in representative politics. He had been involved in endless scandals and controversies about his extremist utterances and about his marriage to reality TV megastar Kim Kardashian. His pronouncements on public affairs were generally incoherent and his manifesto had consisted of 10 verses from the Bible, chosen apparently at random and spelled out in bold block caps.  

It seemed fairly obvious that he was not serious about running the country and that the “campaign” was a fairly transparent publicity stunt.

But wait a minute…

…isn’t that exactly what everybody said about Donald Trump last time around?  Wasn’t Trump written off from the start? Trump was just as much the butt of jokes at the start of his presidential run as West is now. As late as election day itself in 2016, after all, The New York Times analysed the opinion polls and gave Trump only a 5 per cent chance of winning. The Huffington Post put his chances at 2 per cent. The Princeton University Election Consortium put the likelihood of his defeat at 99 per cent, even after the first postal votes had been cast. When Trump, as part of his 2016 campaign, tweeted that Barack Obama would go down as the worst president in US history, Obama read out the tweet to millions watching late night TV and replied: “At least I will go down as a president, unlike Mr Trump.” This zinger brought the house down.

So while describing his political ambitions to Joe Rogan, West recognised that he would face scorn and mockery, just as Trump had done. But that, in a way, was the whole point. He was entering politics, like Trump, from outside the world of “the liberal elite”. Whereas Trump sees the liberal elite as incorrigibly woke Anti-American Marxist Pro-BLM types, West says they are White Supremacists and Haters. Sometimes you have to feel sorry for the Liberal Elite – nobody knows exactly who they are, as a group, and nobody seems to have a good word for them. Either way as an innovator, West would be unconstrained by conventional thinking of any sort.

The Joe Rogan Experience was the ideal place in many ways for candidate West to set out his stall. The podcast is one of the stand-out successes of the alternative podcasting scene with hundreds of millions of mainly young and male listeners across the US and around the world. Rogan is the softest of softball interviewers, enabling his guests to ramble on for up to three hours at a time, and not averse to smoking a joint with interview subjects if they feel like it.

West explained to Rogan that the idea of running for president was more of a response to a spiritual experience than any sort of thought-through plan. The idea was not his own. It had come from God, who had put it “on his heart” when he was in the shower, shortly before the MTV Awards in 2015. He had been wondering what he would say at the awards “and like all this joy came over my body. Just through my soul and I could just, I just felt that energy… that spirit.” His 2020 presidential campaign was greeted with predictable scepticism: “People were like… their minds were blown… and they took it as a joke and they were telling me these millions of reasons why I could not be president.” But he ignored them all. If he had listened to people saying he shouldn’t do something he would have probably not gone into the entertainment business in the first place (and now, even more so, the fashion design business). And the world, in at least his own estimation, would have therefore been a far worse place.

In the meantime West had been expanding his base by launching a new religion called Yeezy Christianity (sometimes rhymed with “Easy” as in easyJet or Easy Cheese). This is believed to be the first religion to be named after a brand of rubber and plastic running shoe – the Yeezy, which West says was inspired by, in no particular order of importance, the creative director of Nike, God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ.

A central plank of this new religion is hatred and loathing for the entertainment industry which enforces a type of “slavery” on performers such as himself who are eager to sign contracts favourable to the big distribution companies, fashion brands and TV networks early in their careers, and then – when the big time comes – find themselves locked into a sickeningly modest share of the sales revenue. There were gigantic profits to be had in selling the sort of over-priced leisurewear that rap stars promoted with their endless flaunting of branded designer consumer products on MTV and elsewhere. This was a type of exploitation and oppression, forever preventing millionaires such as himself from becoming billionaires, like the owners of clothing companies.

People were like… their minds were blown… and they took it as a joke and they were telling me these millions of reasons why I could not be president

The answer was to cut out the middleman and design and market the trainers and hoodies himself. These were bound to be popular because West claims to suffer from (or be blessed with) synaesthesia, the fashionable neurological disorder discovered in the 1960s at the height of the LSD boom in which sound (ie very popular rap music) is perceived as colour and shapes (ie new types of running shoes) and colour and shapes (for example, lava lamps) as sounds. But even with the miraculous ability to sing T-shirts and running shoes into existence, it is hard to stand out in the crowded and fickle fashion market. Christianity in the celebrity world – at least as practised by white folks – had previously been strictly for squares like Cliff Richard, Bono and the Archbishop of Canterbury. But fashion works in cycles, and it was time for West to give the wheel a determined and noisy push.

Thus the latest version of the Yeezy shoe design is the biblically themed Yeezy Ararat. Fashion journalists claim since the shoes look like bulbous feet-boats, the Ararat tag is a reference to Mount Ararat, landing place of Noah’s Arc. The shoes at the moment cost $300 a pair in the US and just under £1,000 if imported to the UK. The Ararat is made out of a single piece of moulded EVA foam and West has emphasised that it is manufactured in the US. But EVA is mostly made in China. Materials to make the shoe and the one-piece moulding process would have a likely unit production cost of about 50p.

In another innovation the branding on the box is on the inside, so you can’t see it until you open it. This is because it is “from the future”. Presumably all packaging in The Future will be (or, according to West, already is) like this – so you won’t know what anything is until after you’ve consumed it. The Future – like the past – truly is a different country and a very perverse one at that. When doing the rounds of the US network chat shows West is always at pains to bring a pair of Arafats along to show off, frequently waving them around or placing them ostentatiously in front of the camera – product placement style – much to the annoyance of the host.

In addition to biblically themed foam-rubber shoes, West has launched the Yeezy Christian Academy or YCA – which is just one M short of Donald Trump’s theme tune YMCA. This is an alarmingly cult-like faith-based junior school, where the kids (including his own children) dress in identical blue Guantanamo-style tracksuits and chant “I still believe in the future” in matching blue-walled rooms.

The school is based on a manifesto of five “founding pillars”, giving it a bit of an Islamic-sounding flavour. The Five Pillars are Faith, Music, Communication, Collaboration and Creativity, the last of these points being officially based upon the principles and nostrums of Walt Disney. The school will act as “the new Nasa for all humanity” West told Rogan before adding, with uncharacteristic modesty: “No disrespect to Nasa.” He is determined that the school will be self-sufficient in food, by means of hydroponic gardening (a technique developed in large part for the mass production of marijuana before legalisation) and will be powered by alternative energy – “the whole thing needs to run off water” … but definitely not tap water, since tap water often contains fluoride. Fluoridation of the water supply, West says, is a conspiracy to “sever the connection between man and God … its hidden in deodorants too”. As a side thought West said it might work a bit like “a beautiful Kenyan village” – maybe the village where Trump conspiracy theorists believe Barack Obama was born.

Rocket science, hydroponic vegetarianism, shoe design, music mixing and innovation brainstorms are planned, but one subject the school will not teach is standard English. “It tears me to the core,” West told Rogan, “that my daughter has to learn the difference between two as ‘t-o-o’ and ‘t-o’. I just want to be like just ‘draw the number 2’!” Communication in YCA will therefore take place mostly in “textlish”. This apparently will be a blow for racial equality: “There are curriculums that are European curriculums that don’t even apply to our genes (as black people),” he told Rogan. The ability to write or speak English correctly means to speak or write like a white person. This seems odd since some of the greatest recent exponents of English, such as Obama and Malcolm X, have been black; whereas to see large numbers of white people barely able to express themselves in any language at all beyond grunts and yelps, all that is needed is to look at the audience of a Trump rally to give just one example. But West is not too worried about the problem: “Only 30 per cent of communication is verbal anyway,” he confidently asserts. “The rest is body language.”

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round … They all laughed when Edison recorded sound … But ho, ho, ho! …Who’s got the last laugh now?

Frank Sinatra

The school is planned as merely the first in a national, or international, chain of YCAs since God has commanded West to become “Leader of the Free World” (with a capital L, possibly by means of appointment by acclamation at the UN General Assembly with tenure and, almost certainly, some sort of ceremonial headwear), in addition to merely being president of the United States. This worldwide network of YCAs will feed the forthcoming Yeezy Gospel University. This will be built before the 2024 presidential race, West predicts, and will play a key role in his campaign. It will feature a 200,000-capacity circular singing stadium and a choir of 100,000 gospel singers “trained in the same way as Russian Olympic athletes”, which seems to imply they will be pumped with large quantities of anabolic steroids. The 100,000-person choir will be streamed on the internet and will function in the same way as the rallies which were so effective for Trump, only much, much better.

Rogan asked West about his plans and policies as Leader/Dictator of the Free World. West was clearly stumped – Trump style – and appeared not to have thought about the topic very much: “Erm, well … I thought of it as if I was a pastor of a 100,000 church and at the same time a captain or sailor … and then we went to war … and I said I am going to man this ship which has a thousand soldiers on it because God is calling me … even though I am however big I am in hip-hop as an influencer and a celebrity – or just as a dad or a husband in my house – the world is like … [long pause] … there couldn’t be a better time to put a visionary in the captain’s chair … I am not here down on Trump or Biden or anyone else, but God has called me to this position.”

God often channels communication with the human race through him, West told Rogan, poker-faced, without blinking. This started after he had prayed for God to release him from the psychological pain he was experiencing as a result of heady and stressful contract wrangles with record companies, bipolar disorder, marriage problems, falling product sales, mounting debt, terrible hairstyling, Twitter wars and tabloid vilification. In response God promptly killed West’s mother. This wanton and sadistic act of murder had been “so painful that nothing would ever feel so painful again”. So it had all been for the good, in a way. West now understandably lives in fear of God to the extent that he shakes with anxiety when he’s praying. On the up side, this sense of fear is so great that he does not fear anyone else. There’s another blessing.

West then started receiving instructions from God on a fairly regular basis. The Almighty is revealed by West to command an impressive vocabulary of swear words: “If you f*** with my vision,” God screamed at West one night, “I am going to f*** with yours.” At the time West was on his laptop discussing the possible abortion of his first child with his wife Kim Kardashian. God’s vision was for the child to be born. West’s vision, at the exact time God started swearing at him, was the screen of his laptop. It suddenly went black and white – a sure sign that the voice was real. Not exactly a burning bush – but a miraculously inspired HDMI cable fault was good enough for West.

The abortion issue – the “A-Word” as West calls it – was one of the main reasons God selected him to run for president. “Abortion culture” in the US was causing the “murder” of “1,000 black children every day”. This was “genocide”. The central plank of his campaign is “Plan A”, which would see unplanned black children sent to orphanages “across the globe” if they could not be adopted. The alternative was “Plan B”, meaning family planning. Plan B is very bad and amounts to “a plan to kill the black race” by the “eugenicists” of the aforementioned Liberal Elite.

Specifics on other policies are few and far between. But there are some: “The meat industry has had a massive effect on the ozone.” The answer is to put all the cows “in round bins”. As President/World Dictator a priority will be to set up an investigation into the way in which the CIA assassinated Bob Marley by the fiendish means of giving him cancer of the foot. Is it mere co-incidence that Marley, Prince and Michael Jackson all died shortly after attempting to renegotiate rip-off contracts with distribution companies? West doesn’t think so. In fact the chance of him being bumped off or poisoned is one of the main potential barriers, he thinks, to his triumphal entry into the Oval Office. This may be why President West would abolish all additives in foods, because “additives in foods make people age”. Without additives in their food people would remain eternally young, as in the Garden of Eden or selected health food stores.

West’s “moonshot” trademark policy would be an impressively ambitious plan to reverse the polarity between immersive computer games and what we are pleased to call actual reality. This would enable people inhabiting so-called reality to enter cyberspace and redesign the “real world” just as they would like it to be – with different options for the colour of trees, size of biceps, preferred bombed-out cityscape and whatnot, and then leave cyberspace and inhabit that. The example given is Grand Theft Auto.

People may write off West as absurd, and his presidential bid as a preposterous publicity stunt. But is the step up from Donald Trump to Kanye West really a bigger gap than the step up from Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama to Trump or even Sarah Palin? Palin had said during her campaign that “if God had meant people to be vegetarians, he would not have invented meat”. Is anything West says any more risible than that?

In his recently published memoirs, ex-president Obama said that the thing that worried him most during his presidency had been the popularity of Sarah Palin, which seemed to grow in proportion to the absurdity of her utterances: “I noticed from the start,” Obama wrote, “that her incoherence did not matter to the vast majority of Republicans; in fact any time she crumbled under questioning by a journalist, they seemed to view it as proof of a liberal conspiracy.” There’s already at least one direct parallel with West. Palin was reputed to have said that she could “see Russia from (her) house” because she lived in Alaska. West meanwhile told Rogan that he was the most qualified candidate ever for president because he had “visited way more countries than anyone else” as a touring rap star.

It seems that figures like Palin, Trump and now maybe even Kanye West actually become more popular the more they screw up – like the underdog in a TV talent show. We might call it the Boaty McBoatface syndrome – a generalised middle finger to the entire political system sent by habitual non-voters or giggling stoners who, increasingly, will be able to vote in real elections online.

Smart alecs, haters and other varieties of pointy-headed types might laugh at West now. But this might not always be the case.

After all, to quote Frank Sinatra (very much the Kanye West of squaresville): “They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round … They all laughed when Edison recorded sound … But ho, ho, ho! …Who’s got the last laugh now?”