Kim Kardashian met with President Donald Trump last week to discuss prison reform. It likely won’t bring about much change policy-wise, but Trump did reportedly use the occasion to tell Kardashian that her hubby, rapper Kanye West, was boosting Trump’s polling numbers with Black voters. It’s too early to tell its veracity and staying power, but Trump’s claim isn’t pulled from thin air.
With West putting on red hats and boasting about his affection for Trump, while also releasing Spotify-topping music last week, it stands to reason that West’s individualistic, apolitical proclamations could influence his 28 million Twitter followers.
As Bloomberg notes, the president was likely referring to a Reuters poll where his favorability numbers with Black men spiked from 11 to 22 percent in late April, just as West tweeted an autographed Make America Great Again cap on April 25. Yet Reuters says the sample size is too small to determine much from the spike, and Pew Research says its poll doesn’t have enough data to be accurately representative of African-Americans. (It didn’t stop the president from bragging about these statistics last month while addressing the National Rifle Association in Texas, though.)
His overall approval rating went up from 12 percent in April to 18 percent in May among Black respondents in the same Reuters poll, however.
Meanwhile, Kardashian didn’t seem to get much out of her meeting with Trump as the president did. Kardashian is a Hillary Clinton voter who has clashed publicly with her husband’s support of Trump, and was stoic when arriving at the White House; she asked Trump to pardon 63-year-old Alice Marie Johnson, who is serving life without parole for a non-violent drug crime. Bloomberg says the president was dismissive of her pitch.
The next day, Trump instead pardoned conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted of campaign finance fraud in 2014.
You could say Kardashian appears over it. On Tuesday, her Instagram Story was on-brand and focused on the day-to-day of her business ventures.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Monday that Trump hasn’t ruled out pardoning Johnson.