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Kanye West hugs Trump, muses on presidential run

By AFP October 12th, 2018 2 min read

Does rap megastar Kanye West support Donald Trump? He loves him — and proved it Thursday by suddenly striding from his chair at a surreal White House meeting to hug the president.

“I love this guy right here,” the serial Grammy-winning artist declared in the Oval Office, before taking the president in his arms.

The rapper had been invited to lunch to discuss prison reform but turned what would ordinarily have been a staid White House photo-op into possibly one of the more unusual — and profanity laden — encounters in the Oval Office’s storied history.

SPEECHLESS

Talking loudly and rapidly on everything from Trump’s protectionist trade polices to replacing Air Force One with a hydrogen plane, black gun crime, being married to Kim Kardashian and “infinite amounts of universe,” West left the normally loquacious president nearly speechless.

“That was quite something,” Trump finally said to laughter from astonished senior aides and journalists at the end of the soliloquy, which West punctuated with bangs of his fist on the legendary Resolute desk, used by presidents since the 1880s.

“It was from the soul. I just channeled it,” the musician said, adding — to further gasps — that Trump “might not have expected to have a crazy motherfucker like Kanye West supporting him.”

Trump said West “could very well be” future presidential material, to which the rapper said he would not want to get in the way of the Republican’s 2020 re-election.

“Only after him in 2024,” West said.

West, who has broken ranks with much of the left-leaning entertainment industry to support Trump, recently took fire for wearing one of the red baseball caps handed out at the president’s raucous “Make America Great Again” rallies.

‘FEEL LIKE SUPERMAN’

West not only wore one of the caps into the Oval Office but declared: “There’s something about when I put on this hat, I feel like Superman.”

Trump can only have been delighted.

The president is pushing hard to portray himself as being on the side of blacks, rather than only the overwhelmingly white voter block behind his surprise election.

Last year, Trump was heavily criticized for what appeared to be his lukewarm condemnation of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He’s also locked in a dispute with several black NFL football players who have knelt down during the playing of the US national anthem to protest racial inequality.