Kanye West running for US president 2020 - 5th July 2020

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By Chris Willman

Rapper Kanye West has announced in a tweet he will run for president of the United States in the November election.

“We must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision and building our future. I am running for president of the United States,” he wrote, followed by the hashtag “2020VISION” and the emblem of an Amercican flag.

That was the entirety of his presidental declaration, which arrived sans press release or other statements, much less a platform, for an election four months away.

The 43-year-old musician and entrepreneur is known for outlandish statements and it is not immediately clear if he plans to follow through with his statement.

Some on Twitter greeted the announcement with a degree of scepticism about West’s real intentions of mounting an independent campaign this close to election day. Not among the sceptics, though: Elon Musk, who tweeted in response: “You have my full support!”

West’s own website bore no information about a presidential run as of this writing. Neither does his Instagram account, which has as its newest entry a three-day-old photo of himself with Musk.

West has not been shy about setting forth presidential ambitions before.

The hip hop artist first said he would run for president in 2020 as he accepted the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award during the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards.

He later said he was serious about running, but that he wouldn’t until 2024.

West admitted he was under the influence of weed at the time. (“Y’all might be thinking right now, ‘I wonder: Did he smoke something before he came out here?’ The answer is yes, I rolled up a little something.”)

This does, at least for the moment, seem to settle the question of whether West intends to vote for Donald Trump, as he has suggested he would, as one of the foremost black supporters of the president in recent years.

“And we know who I’m voting on,” West had said in a length profile published in GQ magazine in April.

“And I’m not going to be told by the people around me and the people that have their agenda that my career is going to be over. Because guess what: I’m still here!”

West, who once wore a MAGA hat to a meeting with the president, also said in that interview that in some ways, conditions had improved under Trump’s presidency: “”I buy real estate. It’s better now than when Obama was in office. They don’t teach you in school about buying property. They teach you how to become somebody’s property.”

More recently, West had used social media to align himself with marchers, suggesting that he was no longer in line with Trump on all things.

The rapper/mogul has recently devoted 100 per cent of his musical output to Christian music.

(AAP)