Kanye West's Bizarre “Presidential Campaign” Seems Little More Than a Republican Sabotage Scheme
August 6th 2020
Donald Trump and Kanye West meeting in October 2018 (Official White House Photo)
By Hunter
Most of us have never wasted a moment of our lives worrying about what Kanye West might be thinking, and are not about to start now. Suffice it to say West announced at one point he was running for president, is making few if any serious attempts to follow up on that announcement, and we'll leave it at that.
What does exist of an actual West campaign, however, seems to be near-entirely a Republican ratfucking operation. The New York Times has a story on just who's "helping" West, and there doesn't seem to be any Republican effort to hide that it's a scheme to siphon votes away from, in their estimation, Joe Biden.
There's Mark Jacoby, who dodged prison time on voter fraud charges as a California Republican with a misdemeanor plea bargain.
There's Gregg Keller, ex-head of the American Conservative Union. Because nothing screams "American Conservative Union material" like, um, Kanye West.
There's the Vermont Republican Party delegate Chuck Wilton, husband of a Trump USDA appointee.
There's Republican National Committee Wisconsin recount lawyer Lane Ruhland, "dropping off ballot signatures" for West in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin case is a bit special in that it's a legitimate swing state and ...
Republicans aren't just hoping, mind you, but running a campaign almost (?) out from under West himself. None of the people the Times identified as West-allied were eager to talk about their work "for" West, and it's not entirely clear whether West himself is paying them or, for that matter, even knows of them.
No, it isn't normal for a campaign's key supporters to flee the press when the press asks who they're working for. That usually defeats the purpose of being a campaign supporter.
So it is not clear what Kanye West intended in his out-of-nowhere campaign announcement, which seems to put his own shameless self-promotion in conflict with his shameless support of Trump. (Side note: Don't care.) But Republicans, and even Trump himself, seem quite confident that it's a move against Joe Biden, not against Donald Trump.
Now, there's an assumption here that seems logical to Trump and Extremely White Republicans that I am not sure is on the square, which is that Kanye West, being a Famous Black Person, will of course get the votes of Democratic-leaning Black Americans, a group that overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden in the primaries and, according to polls, collectively would not put Donald Trump out if he were on fire.
This seems, at the least, a rather cynical view. And if there is one group of political hacks in America that has been egregiously bad at estimating What Black Americans Want, it would be Donald Trump's circle of crackpot supporters. So … yeah.
With that, hopefully we can go back to our site policy of ignoring everything even vaguely related to, sigh, Kanye West. But not quite, because with this particular group of Republican operatives involved, it seems like this is somehow going to end up with someone being indicted, eventually. Call it a hunch.
Posted with permission