A day after Ebro Darden publicly (re-)revealed Kanye West as a supporter, or at least a believer, of Donald Trump, the rapper has responded with nothing but “love” for the Hot 97 DJ.
Here’s how it started. Over the weekend, West took to Twitter to praise controversial conservative personality Candace Owens, writing, “I love the way [she] thinks.” Naturally, he faced backlash from many, including Darden.
Darden’s critiques led to a private phone conversation between the two men—a discussion that Darden then detailed live while on air yesterday. Vulture reports that “according to Darden, Kanye said he intended to contextualize his Owens tweet and ‘wanted to have open dialogue,’ but then decided ‘let me just take this heat right now and maybe people will understand when I put the music out.’”
Darden also reported, “[Kanye] said, ‘I do love Donald Trump. Kanye West quote: ‘I love Donald Trump.’ [Kanye] was like, ‘I reached out to Obama for years and I couldn’t get anything done. Trump gave me a meeting.’ I said, ‘Trump played you, bro.’”
Co-host Peter Rosenberg then doubled-down on Darden’s report, tweeting, “Biggest take away from Ebro in the Morning today … Kanye West is still an avid Donald Trump supporter..you can process that however you like but if you’re waiting for him to say “my bad” about his trump statements — don’t hold your breath.”
Their displays of disappointment likely made their way back to Kanye who called into the radio show today. In response to Darden’s greeting—”Kanye, you wanna do this right now?”—West “Yo, we on air? Look man, I just called to say I love you.” The two men then go back and forth, with Kanye repeating the phrase to twice more and nothing else. Darden asks if he’d like to put on hold, Kanye again says, “Nah, man, just calling to say I love you.” And then sings a bit of Stevie Wonder’s song of the same title. And, finally, when Darden tries to segue the conversation into one about music, ‘Ye shuts the idea down saying, “We should meet up in person and then we can talk on the radio afterwards.”