Your Paranoid Questions

All Your Most Paranoid Questions About Kanye’s Presidential Run, Answered

What in Ye’s name is he doing?

Ben Jacobs
GEN
Published in
6 min readAug 19, 2020

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Kanye West speaking at a meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval office on October 11, 2018.
Photo: Oliver Contreras/Pool/Getty Images News

Since Kanye West announced his presidential bid on Twitter last month, questions have been raised about the rapper’s actions and intentions. He held a bizarre rally in South Carolina in mid-July where he criticized Harriet Tubman and then went on to try to file for the ballot in a seemingly random collection of states. This third-party campaign by West, who was an ardent supporter of Donald Trump — he famously held court in the Oval Office in 2018 while wearing a Make America Great Again hat — has drawn attention for its ties to a number of Republican operatives and activists, along with concerns stemming from his history of mental illness. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, posted on Instagram about the rapper suffering a bipolar episode in late July, pleading for understanding and noting that “those who are close with Kanye know his heart and understand his words sometimes do not align with his intentions.”

So what exactly is going on with Kanye West’s presidential campaign? Let’s start at the beginning.

Can Kanye West be president?

Sure, he’s over 35 and is a natural-born citizen of the United States. There are…

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Ben Jacobs
GEN
Writer for

Ben Jacobs is a politics reporter based in Washington. Follow him on Twitter at @bencjacobs.