Kanye West announced on Saturday night that he plans to run for president in the fall. Immediate details were scant, but the news was met with varying degrees of skepticism. The outlets that tend to report on West’s every move did so, but some pointed out that it would be nothing short of logistically impossible—or that he has an album on the way, and stirring the waters ahead of releases has been in his playbook before. West had previously said he would run for the White House at the VMAs in 2015, but in April he suggested in an interview with GQ that he’d vote for Donald Trump, as his shows of public support for the president might’ve already indicated.
But a new Forbes interview with West that posted in the early hours of Wednesday portrayed the candidacy as genuine, and announced in its headline that “Kanye West Says He’s Done With Trump.” The magazine’s chief content officer Randall Lane delved into some of the details of West’s proposed campaign even as it remains unclear whether he can actually run at this late stage. (West specifically refuted some lines of doubt when asked whether the run was a publicity tactic: “I give my album away for free.”)
“Kanye Finally Dumps Trump” quickly trended on Twitter.
“I am taking the red hat off, with this interview,” West told Forbes. “It looks like one big mess to me,” he said later. “I don’t like that I caught wind that [Trump] hid in the bunker.”
But elsewhere in the interview, West’s departure from the president was less straightforward.
“Trump is the closest president we’ve had in years to allowing God to still be part of the conversation,” West said.
“I’m not saying Trump’s in my way,” he also said. “He may be a part of my way.”
In the coming weeks, maybe the form of what West, who said he’ll run as an independent, called the Birthday Party will become clearer. He said his running mate will be the Wyoming preacher Michelle Tidball and that he’s being advised by Elon Musk. Trump’s own presidential campaign was described on many occasions as a farce before his administration became a reality, so the impulse to take West’s proposed candidacy at face value at this particular moment in political theater might be warranted. But as the Forbes interview is quickly flattened across the internet into “West Dumps Trump,” it might also be worth remembering that this was one possible interpretation back in 2018 too.
A few months later, he tweeted:
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