Kanye West began another interview on Monday, only to walk out 20 minutes later.
Before he bailed on Timcast IRL, West volunteered to “go right to the heart of this anti-Semite claim,” took shots at Donald Trump after having dinner together, and made vague but insistent claims that entities are working to imprison him, possibly over unpaid taxes. The 45-year-old was flanked white nationalist Nick Fuentes, whose presence at the Mar-a-Lago face-to-face sent Trump’s team into damage control, and Milo Yiannopoulos, whose past is also laden with hate speech. West said he was introduced to the latter by a producer for Alex Jones, the alt-right conspiracist recently ordered to pay $1.44 billion in a defamation suit against the families of Sandy Hook Elementary shooting victims.
At the 17:30 mark above, Ye brought up former vice president Mike Pence, who said Trump was “wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier, a seat at the table and I think he should apologize for it.”
“Look at Pence,” West said. “He sold Trump out. You know what I’m saying? I would’ve never wanted to do anything that hurt Trump. I’m on Trump’s side. Trump said things that hurt me. He lied about me, but I mean, he’s known for lying. And when people used to tell me that he’s a liar, it’s like, you know I went into the trenches for Trump. There was no one else in my position that wore that hat.”
After the dinner, Trump proceeded to call Kanye “a seriously troubled man” online. “I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win,” the twice-impeached ex-POTUS wrote on Truth Social. (In a video recapping the meeting, West said Trump disparaged Kim Kardashian and “started basically screaming at me at the table telling me I was gonna lose.”)
“I lost the money for the freedom of speech, and that’s what makes me the only American that we know that really deserves to run the country,” West said on the podcast. “’Cause everyone else—your boy DeSantis, Trump, whoever they raise in a petri dish over on the Democrats’ side—is going to play the game.”
Continuing his campaign of disinformation and anti-Jewish sentiment, Kanye said at the 19:50 mark, “God is using me. He’s breaking me down, removing all of the, you know, ‘richest person,’ all of this, so I can serve him. And the more and more those things are taken away from me, the more I can be empty and be a vessel and be able to be used. And right now it’s like…if we can’t, you’re not gonna take my pain away, right? Jewish people say, ‘It’s the Holocaust, this happened, and you can’t say anything about it.’ We can’t take their pain away. No one’s gonna denounce the fact that they tried to lock me up! ’Cause every time I’m just holding stride, and it’s like, I thought I was Malcolm X but I find out I’m more MLK. Because as I’m getting hosed down every day by the press and financially, I’m just standing there. And when I found out that they tried to put me in jail, it was like a dog was biting my arm, and I almost shed a tear. Almost. But I still walked in stride through it.”
Host Tim Pool replied, “I think they’ve been extremely unfair to you.”
Ye pushed back, “Who is ‘they,’ though? We can’t say who ‘they’ is, can we?”
After a couple more lines were exchanged—including Fuentes piping up with “it is them though, isn’t it?”—West silently walked out. Earlier he warned, “To come in here, I feel like it’s a setup to be like, defending. I’m not gonna go through another, like I’m literally gonna walk the F off the show if I’m sitting up here having to, you know, talk about, ‘You can’t say it was Jewish people that did it.’ When every sensible person knows that—I mean, Jon Stewart knows what happened to me. And they took it too far.”
In one of his numerous remarks about potentially going to prison, West—who said he’d been planning “to buy my own bank” for $50-75 million—recounted, “Someone at CohnReznick tells me—and I tell all of my finance people, never use the term ‘a lot’—but they said okay, you’re gonna have to pay a lot of taxes. And that made me feel like they’re just waiting, like, ‘We finally got him, we finally can put him in jail.’ And I was like, ‘Can I still run for president in jail?’ I found out I could, so I was like okay, that’s fine then. … I’m talking about literally finding out that they were trying to put me in prison this morning. … They put a $75 million hold on four of my accounts. They said [I owe] around $50 million. Now I’m going around to different CFOs like, okay, so would this be tax evasion? Because I’m obviously not the most financially literate person on the planet.”
Also on Monday, Sen. Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor, “For a former president to sit down and have dinner with a high-profile anti-Semite is disgusting and dangerous. To give an anti-Semite even the smallest platform, much less an audience over dinner, is pure evil.”
