Kanye West confirmed he met with Jared Kushner in Colorado last weekend, amid accusations the rapper is running for president to siphon off votes from Joe Biden.
West took to Twitter to reveal the meeting after The New York Times learned of it and contacted him for comment.
West’s bizarre presidential campaign has moved from Twitter sideshow to potential spoiler.
The billionaire rapper last week released a website and campaign platform as he moves to get on the ballot in pivotal states—those around him increasingly worry about his mental health issues.
And specifically whether one consigliere is trying to exploit them.
According to multiple sources, Kushner has been speaking with West regularly since his July 4 tweet declaring that he was running for president.
While Republican operatives rush to try get him on ballots across the country, the New York Times reported that Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, met with West last weekend in Telluride, Colorado.
The connection goes much further.
West has been telling associates that he and Kushner speak “almost daily.”
Forbes spoke with four people who have direct access to either West or Kushner, including two with direct knowledge of their conversations.
One thing that particularly upsets those close to the Yeezy sneaker mogul, who is openly bipolar, is his apparent delusion about his chances of winning.
When a reporter pointed out to West last week during an interview that he won’t be on enough ballots to win 270 electoral votes, and thus seemed intent on running a spoiler campaign designed to hurt Democratic nominee Joe Biden, he responded, “I’m not going to argue with you.”
But a few hours after the story appeared, West responded with a change of heart: “THE GOAL IS TO WIN,” he blared in a tweet that was liked more than 260,000 times.
And that seems to be the message that Kushner has been feeding him: “Jared’s scared and doesn’t want me to run because he knows that I can win,” West has told numerous associates after his conversations with the president’s son-in-law, who also serves as de facto chief of Trump’s reelection campaign.
That message, the sources close to West acknowledge, is the exact one that will embolden West to stay in the race.
“If you know him for more than 20 minutes, you know that will work,” says one West confidant.
Adds another: “He’s just like a kid. The more you tell him he can’t do a thing, the more he’ll do it. . . . he has a tremendous drive to prove people wrong.”
Kushner seems to have an outsize influence over West.
Their relationship helped bring West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, to the White House for an instantly famous Oval Office meeting, and they collaborated on ideas for sentencing reform.
The White House gambit, those close to him say, has accelerated West’s mental issues (unquestionably brilliant, he has previously told Forbes that he considers his bipolar condition a “superpower”).
“He’s mentally ill,” says a West friend. “When you have people around him who have the best intentions and don’t need anything from him, you can steer him when he’s in that space into a positive place. When you have people around him who see him as an opportunity, they create a very, very bad scenario.”
Some close to West feel that Kushner now falls into that latter camp in ways that flirt with exploitation—concerning, after Kardashian West asked publicly for “compassion and empathy.”
One described their understanding of Kushner’s conversations with West as “reverse psychology.”
Others prescribe less malicious intent, though that narrative would require a level of naiveté that would rank up there with sitting in a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians who promise to have dirt on Hillary Clinton.
“Jared, why are you meeting with him?” asks one source. “Tell him, ‘Hey, man, I saw you’re running for president—let’s talk when the election’s over.’”
In his interview with The Times, West did not offer more details on his meeting with Kushner but, instead, expressed anger about abortion rates among black women and said he didn’t support Democrats.
West launched a last minute presidential bid six weeks ago with the help of Republican operatives.
West has qualified for the presidential ballot in states like Arkansas, Vermont, Oklahoma and Colorado, but his attempts in Ohio and Wisconsin are being challenged.