Kanye West has said he no longer considers himself a supporter of
Donald Trump, in his first interview about his own plans to run for US president.
The controversial
Rapper has been talking about running for president in 2020 for almost five years, first declaring it during his acceptance speech at the
MTV VMAs in 2015.
Over the weekend, he made headlines when he repeated his intention to run for office on Twitter, and has now spoken to Forbes about his political ambitions, as well as his past endorsement of Donald Trump.
Kanye told the magazine he no longer supports Trump, declaring: “I am taking the red hat off, with this interview.”“One of the main reasons I wore the red hat as a protest to the segregation of votes in the Black community,” he explained. “Also, other than the fact that I like Trump hotels and the saxophones in the lobby.”
Explaining his past support of Trump, Kanye – who runs weekly Christian gatherings dubbed the Sunday Service – claimed that the US leader is the “closest president we’ve had in years to allowing God to still be part of the conversation”.In more alarming parts of the interview, Kanye also shared his own anti-vaccine sentiments (“that’s the mark of the beast… they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven”) and
anti-abortion stance (“Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work”).
On his political ambitions, Kanye said he’ll be running as an independent candidate under the new banner of the Birthday Party, and has been receiving guidance from
Elon Musk, who endorsed his run for president on
Twitter on Sunday morning.
He also said that “if Trump wasn’t there”, he would run as a
Republican candidate.
Despite having been among Trump’s most vocal supporters, in 2018 Kanye tweeted that he would be “distancing himself from politics”, claiming his name had been used to “spread messages I don’t believe in”.READ MORE: Piers Morgan Begs
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