Despite years and years of Kanye West’s unhinged behavior, he still manages to catch people off guard.
On Independence Day, Kanye decided to announce that he is running to be President of the United States.
In 2015, Kanye West was for some reason awarded the Video Vanguard Award at the VMAs.
This unfortunately meant that he was allowed to speak to the audience. At that time, he threatend to run for President in 2020.
At the time, the whole sounded farcial. Now, Kanye is making that mostly forgotten joke into a horrifying new reality.
“We must now realize the promise of America,” Kanye tweeted on the evening of July 4, 2020.
He wrote that this promise can be realized “by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future.”
“I am running for president of the United States,” he threatens, sending a chill down the spines of millions.
In case anyone was wondering if any other members of the Insufferable Rich Clown Squad are also Team Kanye, the answer is yes.
D-list supervillain Elon Musk, who was hanging out with Kanye just a few days ago, immediately tweeted his support.
“You have my full support!” he tweeted as if that were a reasonable, non-embarrassing thing to say.
Naturally, Twitter was immediately filled with countless tweets roasting Kanye.
While there is a lot to be said about the ethics of making fun of an unmedicated man who appears to be surrounded by enablers …
… We should remember that Kanye is still accountable for much of his behavior and poor choices.
A few people decided to make memes joking about supporting Kanye, which seems to be in very poor taste.
Others are taking his threat to run for President very seriously, warning that it may be a ploy to divide voters.
Honestly? He may mean it seriously, but many are unsure if Kanye is sufficiently grounded in the real world to predict this outcome.
Some are asking — or even hoping — that Kanye is already past the deadline for a Presidential run.
The answer is complicated.
There is no formal federal deadline for running, but each state has their own ballot access laws for registering to appear on the ballot.
Some people immediately expressed their hopes that Kanye is just joking.
He may eventually say that he was joking, just has he recently claimed that his Trump support was just a ploy.
But if he is joking right now, then Kim is playing along with him, as evidenced by her quote-tweet.
The amount of time that passed between his tweet and hers is raising some eyebrows.
Usually, people announcing their candidacy have a lengthy talk with their loved ones first, as well as meeting with campaign managers.
Their announcement is then carefully planned. Whether or not anything like that happened for Kanye, or whether Kim even knew, is unclear.
So aside from his general lack of impulse control and tendency to make statements that do not reflect reality, what is the issue with Kanye running?
For one thing, Kanye’s infamous meeting with Donald Trump is still a fixture in the minds of many Americans.
He can claim anything that he likes about his motives for the photo op, but the damage from that meeting was done.
Additionally, Kanye has had many gaffes, including his comments about slavery having been a “choice.”
Slavery was not, for the record, a choice — choosing a job is literally antithetical to slavery.
Kanye can offer up all of the explanations that he likes, but nothing can ever make that an okay thing to have said.
Much more recently, Kanye did a lengthy interview in which he announced plans to change his name to Christian Genius Billionaire.
During that interview, he raved about many irrational topics, at one point claiming that doctors had given him drugs to “silence” him.
In fact, he even accused medical professionals of prescribing medications that caused him to gain weight “on purpose.”
If anyone had “Kanye runs for President” on their 2020 apocalypse bingo sheet, you may as well go ahead and mark that one.
We do not know if Kanye will actually follow through on this fever dream of a Presidential run.
And if he does run, it is unclear whether or not he will run as Ye, Kanye, or Christian Genius Billionaire. So many choices.