An energized Kanye West met with President Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon. The two men were getting ready for lunch with NFL great Jim Brown, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner. You can watch their meeting here.
Kanye announced that he had brought the president a gift. He walked over to Trump and held out his phone, to show him a picture of what he said was “the i-plane 1 — a hydrogen-powered airplane –this is what the president should be flying in.” Kanye said that he was working with Apple to develop such a plane. Then Kanye set out his thoughts about Trump and the respect he should be getting. The star, who has come under fire from liberals for his support of Donald Trump, said,
” What I need SNL [Saturday Night Live] to improve on, or the liberals to improve on, is, if he don’t look good, we don’t look good. This is our president. He has to be the freshest, the flyest, the flyest plane, the best factories, and we have to make our core be in power, we have to bring jobs to America, because our best exports is entertainment and ideas; but when we make everything in China and not America we’re cheating our country and we’re putting people in the position where they have to do illegal things and they end up in the cheapest factory ever, the prison system.”
After Kanye’s speech, Trump, not usually one to be silent, said quietly, “That was quite something.”
“That was from the soul,” Kanye responded.
Kanye turned to the issue of racism, saying “As black people, we also need to take responsibility for what we’re doing. We kill each other more than police officers.”
He said “I think that with blacks, and African Americans, we really get caught up in the idea of racism over the idea of industry. If people don’t have land, they settle for brands. We want Polo Sports Obama again. We want a brand more than we want land because we haven’t known how it feels to have our own land, have ownership of our own blocks. When you don’t have ownership, it’s all about how something looks.”