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Kanye West asks Trump to be his running mate in 2024 presidential bid

Kanye west Donald trump - Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Kanye west Donald trump - Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Kanye West has revealed Donald Trump began screaming at him after the rapper announced he would be competing for the White House in 2024 and asked the former president to be his running mate.

West, who now goes by the name Ye, declared his presidential bid on Thursday night with a tweet of his campaign logo and the words ‘Ye 24’. It follows Mr Trump’s own announcement earlier this month that he would be seeking the Republican nomination for the third time.

“The thing that Trump was most perturbed about [is] me asking him to be my vice president,” West said of a meeting with Mr Trump this week to discuss politics.

“When Trump started basically screaming at the table telling me I was gonna lose, I mean, has that ever worked for anyone in history? I’m like, ‘wait, hold on Trump, you’re talking to Ye’,” he said laughing.

West recalled the incident at Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, in a video released on his social media on Thursday night.

He also revealed that he impressed Trump by bringing the leading alt-Right figure and white nationalist Nick Fuentes to the meeting.

“It was the fact that I walked in with intelligence. So Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes,” West said in the video titled “Mar-a-Lago debrief”.

Mr Fuentes, 24, is a controversial figure well-known for attending the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rally turned violent when an avowed neo-Nazi drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman and injuring 35 people.

Mr Trump, who was president at the time, infamously said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville clashes.

Mr Fuentes hosts an online show called “America First with Nicholas Fuentes”, where he has been known to make anti-Semitic comments.

He openly praises Adolf Hitler, believes that the Holocaust was a hoax, and is opposed to women’s right to vote.

Mr Trump said in a statement on Friday: "Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about."

West’s presidential bid follows a failed one he made in 2020, which attracted just 70,000 votes. His campaign was marked by unpredictability after making erratic statements that raised concerns over his mental health.