Kanye campaign could split vote and open door for Trump re-election
Rapper Kanye West’s injection into the presidential race could split the non-white vote and see Donald Trump retain his place in the White House for four more years, Claire Harvey writes.
Opinion
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Kanye West isn’t the clown prince. He isn’t a tormented artiste.
He’s Donald Trump’s greatest asset, and if he succeeds in his mission of draining black votes away from the Democrats, he’ll be single-handedly responsible for returning to power the worst president America — and the world — has ever seen.
My favourite pastime at the moment is watching so-called conservatives who once backed Donald Trump shimmy themselves further and further into an ideological corner.
Four years ago, they could say they liked Trump because he spoke up for the forgotten Americans whose rust-belt jobs were under threat.
They could say Trump represented a spirit of outsiderism that the Washington swamp so desperately needed, to blast away the smug urban elites of the New York Times and Hollywood.
All that was rubbish. Whatever the flaws of politics-as-usual, Trump represented nothing but self-interested cronyism and dangerous stupidity. He’s an anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist. He’s a protectionist and a nationalist, a cheater and a liar: all the stuff that the very same free-market, family-values conservatives once said they despised.
At one point it was apparently chic, in certain circles, to say Trump was an underestimated genius who understood and empathised with voters on the economic and social margins. The reverse was true: they pinned their hopes on him despite his manifest flaws, and then the Democrats sealed the deal with their infinitely regrettable choice of Hillary Clinton as candidate.
Trump hasn’t changed. He’s still the pussy-grabbing professional bankrupt he was in 2016.
The difference now is it’s increasingly hard to pretend he has any capacity to represent a spirit of outsiderism. He’s now the ultimate insider, at the heart of the beast, and he has nobody else to blame for the criminal failures that resulted in 145,000 COVID-19 deaths.
Now Kanye West is entering the presidential race with one guaranteed result: a split in the non-white vote.
West is Trump’s greatest chance of pulling it off again: another election where a small minority ‘wins’ the election because there isn’t an alternative candidate able to draw enough votes.
If Kanye persists with this candidacy, and regardless of how odd his behaviour becomes, his pure celebrity will attract a certain number of votes: probably black, probably young, probably people who’d struggle to bring themselves to vote for Trump.
In 2016 we saw the distorting power of celebrity and the harm it can do. I fear we’re about to see it again.