The Groan-Worthy Nature of Kanye West’s 2020 Presidential Bid

We are only halfway through 2020 and yet the year itself seems intent to stubbornly refuse to cease its detour into the realm of the absurd. Singer Kanye West has decided to take the “opportunity” of the July 4th holiday to announce his own candidacy for president of the United States. His announcement came in the form of a tweet, in which he declared his “platform” to be based on realizing “the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future.” He capped off the announcement with the establishment of a new hashtag; #2020Vision. And because 2020 is 2020, virtually no-one reading the news of this announcement knew what to make of it. Was it serious? Was it a trollish statement aimed at causing unrest on the internet? Was it a bizarre attempt at promoting an upcoming Kanye West album? Or was it a sinister conspiracy devised by the Trump campaign to siphon black votes away from Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden? 

The scary thing is, as “funny” as a Kanye West presidency might appear on its surface (Make America Yeezy Again, anyone?), we’ve been here before, and the results of that “joke” turned out to be disastrous for the country as a whole. Donald Trump himself was largely marketed as a “meme president” of sorts, and every time he even flirted with the idea of a presidential run it made national headlines. Before The Apprentice catapulted Trump’s popularity into the stratosphere, he had actually attempted a presidential run on the Reform party ticket for the 2000 United States presidential election, but ultimately withdrew in February citing his distaste for the organization (or lack thereof) of the Reform Party as a whole and lack of confidence that they would secure him a victory in the general election. 

This failed campaign is infrequently discussed and is largely of little consequence, for it was The Apprentice, which kicked off in 2004, that cemented the memetic persona that Trump is known for today. The cultural awareness of his obstinate personality, his iconic catchphrase of “you’re fired,” his orange complexion, his ludicrous hair, and his general air of complete authority and control can all be attributed both to the popularity of his show and how he behaved on it. Since being brought further into mainstream attention, Trump has made comments regarding the 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections implying he would be seeking positions in government. For the most part, these comments made national headlines as audiences across the country found humor in the notion of someone as impolite as Trump holding the office of president. Although comedian John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, is perhaps one of Trump’s most ardent critics these days, even he took enjoyment in the idea of a Trump campaign (although not necessarily a Trump presidency) and even encouraged it during a 2013 segment of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. 

All of Trump’s absurdity merged together to craft an effective walking meme, and for the most part the early days of his campaign for the 2016 election gave us everything we ever wanted out of him. Back when Trump was just a political anomaly running on the Republican ticket and he was forced to share the stage with a slew of far more professional and experienced contenders for the nomination, it was legitimately hilarious to see, in the very first Republican debate hosted by Fox News, Trump being the one and only candidate to refuse to pledge not to run as an independent against the Republican Party’s ultimate nominee. It was similarly hilarious, in the months that followed, to see Trump effectively bully his opponents into submission with childish insults and personal attacks directed not only at the candidates themselves but also, at least in the case of Ted Cruz, their families. It was especially bizarre to see Trump, in the middle of a televised speech directed at his supporters, pour a bottle of water on stage and shout “it’s Rubio!” to mock the simple fact that Rubio took a sip of water in the middle of a prepared response to one of then-President Barack Obama’s speeches. “I need water! Help! Help!” came Trump’s churlish insults as he continued to eviscerate an infantile shade of Rubio to the cheers of his adoring fans. 

It was all great television, for a little while at least. 

One by one Trump’s opponents fell, and all of a sudden the man we enjoyed to laugh at became a very legitimate contender for the Republican Party’s nomination and, ultimately, the presidency. The time had come for us to stop laughing and start evaluating his policy positions as a legitimate candidate. But there was a problem with that; we never took Trump seriously because we had assumed his policy positions had been as much of a meme as he was. Forcing a foreign government (Mexico) to pay for a massive wall along the southern border of the United States in an attempt to curb an illegal immigration problem that Trump himself had overblown? Not only was it almost impossible to get Mexico on board with such a plan, the dollar estimates Trump had proposed, as well as the actual material and dimensions of the wall, seemed to vary wildly in his public speeches based on however he felt at the time. Trump’s notorious wall wasn’t his only campaign platform, but it is perhaps the greatest illustration of his political incompetence. This incompetence was only reinforced the more time Trump was allowed on-air to discuss his platform, but even worse than that was the fact that Trump nonchalantly used this time to expose some truly abhorrent moral failings about himself. Trump accused the Mexican government of sending drug-dealers, criminals, and murderers; he suggested that the U.S. response to international terrorism should involve “taking out the families” of terrorists; he supported waterboarding as a means of torture and vowed that he would “bring back a hell of a lot worse” if elected president; and he explicitly stated that he would appoint supreme court justices with the express purpose of overturning Roe V. Wade, callously threatening the abortion rights of women across the nation. 

His positions were consistently so ludicrous in practicality and hateful in terms of rhetoric that we assumed giving him air time was the equivalent of letting him tie his own noose around his neck, and so the strategy for news-media was twofold: report on virtually every outlandish statement Trump made regardless of context, and allow his performative speeches a considerable amount of air time during prime news hours. What happened at the end of 2016 could only be described as a massive failure to read the room, for while pollsters were reasonably certain that Trump’s Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, who had consistently demolished Trump at every one of their debates, it took us all by surprise that the evidence that had been broadcast that showed Trump’s unfitness for office had actually endeared him enough to become president, ultimately defeating Clinton with 304 electoral votes to her 232. 

The meme-man had won, and as we are enduring the fourth and hopefully final year of his term, we can truly see the extent of how unfit for office he was the entire time. The sobering reality of the state of U.S. politics in the 21st century is that the race for presidency is, at its core, a popularity contest, but not necessarily a good kind of popularity. I would hope that a decent number of the voting public would at least endeavor to be informed enough about who they’re voting for that they would take a few moments to research the intricacies of their chosen candidates’ policies, but the realist in me understands that many don’t have the time or the will to do that. 

So, barring a comprehensive evaluation of a politician’s platform, what remains for someone to base their support on? Image. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on the truly horrible statements uttered by Trump back when he was just a candidate, from his xenophobic comments on Islam to his dog-whistling to second-amendment supporters that a Clinton presidency would take away their rights and that only they “could do something about it.” The media gave him the time and space to spread his messaging into every home in the country. As a result, what should have been the portrait of a morally bankrupt individual was a lump of clay that Trump could mold into a sculpture of a strong-man; a go-getter constantly under fire from “the establishment” simply for telling it as it is. Astonishingly, one of the privileged men in American history was orienting himself as an everyman, and when the infamous Access Hollywood tape came out in October of 2016 and featured Trump’s voice on tape claiming that he could grab women “by the pussy” because he was famous and women let famous men “do anything,” he similarly spun it off as “locker room talk” and implied that this conversation was just one of many being had by men behind closed doors. 

Make no mistake; we let him get away with that. In a sense, one might argue that the “Me Too” movement unfortunately came a year too late, for it should have been here that the reckoning for the misogynistic role of men in power happened. Instead, we not only censored out the word “pussy” in discussions about the topic to appease our own sensibilities, but we also gave Trump the time and space not only to defend the indefensible, but also to claim that the rest of America was as ugly as he was. 

The lesson to learn about Trump is that the image he was slowly building for himself may have been one that we took enjoyment in laughing at, but we understood far too late just how appealing we were making him over time. His political illiteracy was irrelevant to voters because Trump tapped into memes on an emotional bases rather than a pragmatic one. “Build the wall” is bad foreign policy, and to date it still hasn’t happened, and while those who were smart enough to know it was doomed to fail from the beginning were laughing at its absurdity, Trump’s actual voters supported the idea because he was able to make it sound effective with hateful nationalistic rhetoric. 

And we never should have handed him the microphone to begin with. 

And so now we’re at a point where history threatens to repeat itself, and its champion this time is… of all people, Kanye West. Now, in all fairness, West doesn’t have a reasonable chance at winning the general election in November. Even if he were to register as a candidate immediately, assuming he hasn’t already done so, there are a good number of delegate-rich states that wouldn’t allow him on the ballot. Additionally, there’s reason enough to believe that Kanye may not have been serious to begin with, as the Federal Election Commission (with whom West would need to register in order to run for president) does not feature his name on their website. The only Kanye West in their database is one “Kanye Deez Nuts West” running on the Green Party ticket, which is almost certainly a joke by a satirist or someone with far too much time on their hands. 

But the threat here isn’t that West will transform into some magnanimous dark horse candidate and ride she fantastical wave of disgruntled independent voters into the office of the president. No, the true threat here is that West will be enticing enough as an independent or write-in candidate that he will secure enough independent votes that might have otherwise gone to someone like Joe Biden and essentially secure Trump a second term. And I will admit bias here; perhaps it is because we are so close to ending a national nightmare that I am willing to be callous towards an ineffectual third-party candidate that, in any other election, wouldn’t be worth giving the time of day. If there’s one thing that we need to understand about U.S. politics it is how fragile our system truly is. In 2016, Clinton lost the delegate-rich state of Florida to Trump by only about 100,000 votes while over 353,000 votes went to third-party candidates like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. It wouldn’t be accurate to assume, had Johnson and Stein not existed, that all those votes would have gone to Clinton. But our country is not run as a democracy in the purest sense, and because each state’s electoral votes are awarded to candidates wholesale we really do not have the luxury of allowing hundreds of thousands of voters essentially throwing away their votes on candidates with no legitimate path to the white house or, worse yet, voting for candidates just for the jokes. 

And make no mistake; Kanye’s public persona is almost as ludicrous as Trump’s, and this has already fostered a meme culture around Kanye that only benefits his popularity. And I could go item by item as I attempted to explain why West is an absurd character in our culture, from his nonsensical diss tracks to his behavior at the MTV Video Music Awards, but as we’ve seen with Trump simply talking about the meme-worthiness of such a man runs the very dangerous risk of only endearing him to the public. In fact, it is incredibly disheartening to see comments under his initial Twitter announcement such as “I could care less about who runs the country anymore. I’m just gonna vote Kanye for the memes.” 

It hurts. It hurts so profoundly.

So let’s get it right this time around. West is not a legitimate candidate for president, so let’s not give him the free platform to attempt to legitimize himself. His understanding of social issues is just as bad if not even worse than Trump’s own takes. Even if we disregard the fact that Kanye has been very overt about his ardent support for Trump until his sudden criticism of him for hiding out in a bunker during the George Floyd protests, there are still the incredibly sticky situations of Kanye’s platforming of anti-vaccine rhetoric during one of the most contagious pandemics in U.S. history and his characterizations of 400 years of slavery as “a choice.” 

While I can understand the modern-day skepticisms of the institutions we call “the establishment,” I can safely say that if there is one thing that four years of Trump has taught me, it is that political positions should probably be held by politicians. West has no business in politics. He has no business as a candidate asking for people’s votes. And if the popularity contest we call the presidential election continues to devolve to a point where the the most popular choice is simply “the meme-iest,” then America will continue to be an international laughingstock and devolve to a point where it is barely recognizable. 

So let’s take this opportunity to learn from our mistakes, stop the bleeding, and center discussions around things that actually matter; policy proposals designed to combat actual social ills. After all, it turns out the last guy we laughed at had some pretty horrifying ideas, and if we spend another four years laughing it’ll be too late to stop him from seeing the worst of those ideas to fruition.