Kanye West is to meet with US President Donald Trump later this week, the White House has confirmed.
The rapper, who is arguably Trump’s most high-profile celebrity supporter, will have lunch with the POTUS on Thursday, where they’re expected to discuss prison reform and gang violence, among other topics.
Their meeting will take place just weeks before the mid-term elections, due to take place next month.
In recent months, Kanye has repeatedly taken heat for his support for Donald Trump, most notably when he posted a string of tweets describing the President as his “brother”, commenting they “are both dragon energy”.
Earlier this month, Kanye found himself being booed by the audience at ‘Saturday Night Live’, after his musical performance descended into pro-Trump rhetoric.
He continued to voice his support for Trump, and claimed he’d been “bullied” by the ‘SNL’ team for wanting to sport his “Make America Great Again” hat on the show, even carrying on his speech after producers pulled the plug for timing reasons.
“There’s so many times I talk to, like, a white person about this and they say, ‘How could you like Trump? He’s racist.’,” he told the audience. “Well, uh, if I was concerned about racism I would’ve moved out of America a long time ago.”
Kanye was later put on blast by singer/songwriter Lana Del Rey over a tweet in which he wrote: “[‘Make America Great Again’] represents good and America becoming whole again. We will no longer outsource to other countries. We build factories here in America and create jobs.
“We will provide jobs for all who are free from prisons as we abolish the 13th amendment.”
Earlier this year, Kanye’s wife Kim Kardashian made headlines when she held her own meeting with Trump, which led to the pardoning of 63-year-old Alice Marie Johnson, who had been serving a life sentence for a first-time, non-violent drug offence.