President Donald Trump believes that Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian West are the reason behind his recent boost in African-American support.
Bloomberg News is reporting that Trump told Kardashian West that the couple had helped him gain more popularity among Black voters.
Kardashian West visited Trump at the White House last week to discuss prison reform and to campaign for the pardon of Alice Marie Johnson, a 65-year-old woman who is serving a life sentence in prison for a nonviolent drug offense.
It is not clear how Kardashian West responded to Trump’s claim.
The president appeared to be referring to data from a Reuters weekly tracking poll, in which the portion of Black men approving of Trump doubled within a week in late April. However, Reuters considers the number of African-American respondents to those weekly polls too small to reliably indicate a shift in opinion.
Around that same period of time, West praised Trump on Twitter and said that the two both had “dragon energy.” He also stepped out in a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat and praised Black conservative Candace Owens who has openly dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Kanye West must have some power because you probably saw I doubled my African-American poll numbers. We went from 11 to 22 in one week,” Trump said in early May at the National Rifle Association’s annual conference.
The rapper also used his new music, specifically the song “Ye vs. The People,” to defend his support for Trump last month.
“I know Obama was Heaven sent, but ever since Trump won, it proved that I could be president,” West raps on the track, in which he is debating rapper T.I., a known Trump critic.
Kanye also accused former president Barack Obama of never doing anything for Chicago.