Proving once again that he’s full of more than just a few surprises, music icon Kanye West told former late-night host David Letterman to his face that liberals “bully” Trump supporters.
According to The Daily Beast, Kanye West appeared on Letterman’s Netflix show, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” where the pair talked about a variety of topics, from music to fashion to mental health. When the discussion segued into the musician’s famed relationship with President Trump, things got spicy.
“This is like my thing with Trump — we don’t have to feel the same way, but we have the right to feel what we feel,” West told Letterman.
The rapper added that he wears the “Make America Great Again” hat not to show support for Trump’s politics but to break the stigma that comes with supporting Trump. Letterman, of course, tried to obfuscate West’s point by claiming his opinion should not matter because Kanye did not vote in the last election.
“Did you vote for Trump?” Letterman asked.
“I’ve never voted in my life,” Kanye responded.
“Then you don’t have a say in this,” Letterman shot back, prompting cheers from the audience.
Not necessarily. Given that Kanye West is a cultural figure, his opinion on the matter of how Trump supporters are treated certainly does have weight.
“Well you got me, you got me,” West said in response to Letterman’s big “gotcha” moment.
Letterman then pressed Kanye West on supposed voter suppression efforts by Republicans during the 2018 mid-terms. “So if I see a person that I admire talking about Donald Trump can think whatever he does” Letterman said, “I wonder if those thoughts, indirectly, aren’t hurting people who are already being hurt.”
Kanye did not address Letterman’s point and instead talked about how Trump supporters are “treated like enemies of America because that’s what they felt.”
“Have you ever been beat up in your high school for wearing the wrong hat?” Kanye asked Letterman. “Liberals bully people who are Trump supporters!”
Much of West’s rhetoric matches what he said upon his initial show of support for Trump, that he does not agree with all his politics but does not believe people should be bullied for agreeing with him.
“You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him,” West tweeted in April of last year. “We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don’t agree with everything anyone does. That’s what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.”
Indeed, there have been multiple cases across the United States of Trump supporters being bullied simply for wearing a MAGA hat. Often, media figures and cultural figures characterize Trump supporters as racists who conflate “Make America Great Again” with “Make America White Again.” Just this week, actor Jeff Daniels compared Trump supporters to the KKK.
“That’s what I see when I look at Donald Trump’s rallies, that’s when I see the lies he’s spewing at these people, and people going, ‘I gotta believe in something,’ and he said he’d bring my manufacturing job back and he didn’t … but at the end of the day, it’s race. It’s race” Daniels said on MSNBC.
“This is about the Republican Party — or a wing of it — going: ‘This is our last chance to save the party. And if we don’t, it’s the end of the Republican Party,'” Daniels continued. “And the only way they can do that was to tap the race button and say, ‘Go ahead, it’s OK.’ And [Trump] did. And they did. That was the only card they had left to play, and they played it. And they aren’t going to go quietly.”