Kanye West To Meet With President Trump This Week
Kanye West is heading off to the nation’s capital to sit down with President Trump for a discussion on the advancement of several prison reform and job development initiatives. This, according to the New York Times, which broke the news after receiving word from a representative who confirms that the president and the producer have got a meeting scheduled for Thursday, October 11.
Kanye is expected to use his time at the table to petition the commander in chief to make former convicts a priority in his agenda for continued economic growth. The Times reports that Ye primarily plans on targeting ways to expand work opportunities for those with a criminal past, during their conversation.
The exact scope of the 41-year-old musician and fashion magnate’s vision remains a mystery to date but over the past month or so he has revealed an intention to re-dedicate his energies toward rebuilding Chicago, and he’s followed his vow up by paying a visit to Pitbull’s SLAM charter school, Jim Brown’s Amer-I-Can program, and a couple of other non-profit organizations doing work in marginalized communities. Unfortunately, Ye’s knack for stirring controversy has taken the public’s focus away from such endeavors, with the adoration he’s continually showed toward his “Make America Great Again” hat provoking backlash after backlash.
To anyone keeping track, however, Kanye has said enough about the unpopular red cap to reveal that his attachment to it is not divorced from his advocacy of prison reform and economic empowerment. Prior to deleting his social media accounts, Ye got himself into a heap of trouble by calling for the abolition of the 13th Amendment. But by the time cooler heads prevailed, he had made a correction to clarify that he meant to call for an amendment of the 13th Amendment, with the intention of pushing for legislation that will outlaw unpaid and under-compensated prison labor.
“In order to make a free man a slave, all you have to do is convict them of a crime,” CBS News quotes Kanye as having explained. “There’s people getting paid $0.08 a week working for companies that are privately owned and a lot of them are first-time offenders. A lot of them are nonviolent crimes. And then also we deal with, we’re not dealing with the mental health and the therapy.”
Days after the controversy, Kanye further elaborated on how a combination of prison reform and radical economic initiatives might help alleviate the plight of citizens living in places like Chicago – and he tied it all in with his relationship to the president and the significance that his MAGA hat has to him.
“I know we can definitely open up a factory in the community. Adidas can show us how we can have jobs here in America. This is one of the reasons why I love this hat. It’s this idea of us building factories and having jobs here,” Ye said at the 6:17 mark in his interview with The Hollywood Fix. “The way that we got to make our country great is that we’ve got to provide jobs and opportunities for people who don’t have that – that end up doing activities that they shouldn’t that end up putting them into a slave situation, end up getting them locked up,” he said.
