Rapper Ye posts campaign videos after confirming 2024 presidential bid

Artist formerly known as Kanye West says former US president Donald Trump "screamed" when asked to be running mate

Rapper Ye, at the time known as Kanye West, at his 2018 meeting with then US President Donald Trump at the White House. AFP

The rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has begun posting apparent campaign videos on Twitter after announcing a new bid to run for US president in 2024.

Ye posted several videos captioned #YE2024 late on Thursday, two days after a meeting with Donald Trump in Florida, at which he says he asked the former US president to be his running mate.

In the footage, which garnered more than one million views in two hours, Ye makes references to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, his White Lives Matter apparel and Mr Trump insulting his former wife, Kim Kardashian.

He also addressed his partnership with Adidas, which announced on Thursday that it would launch an investigation into misconduct by the rapper. Ye's partnership with the German sportswear brand ended last month after a string of anti-Semitic comments.

He referenced his controversial views in the videos on Thursday with a montage of newsreels covering his remarks and his White Lives Matter T-shirt, ending with a shot of himself accompanied with “Ye 2024”.

Another video shows him talking about his meeting with Mr Trump on Tuesday.

Ye says he wore jeans to the meeting and arrived late at Mr Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.

Ye says he caught Mr Trump “off guard” by “walking in with intelligence”.

The former president “was screaming at the table” and told Ye he would lose.

“Has that ever worked for anyone in history? Telling me that I'm going to lose?” Ye says in the video.

Ye previously ran for president in 2020, but only secured 60,000 votes across 12 states. He was a strong supporter of Mr Trump in his 2016 presidential run, and spoke at a campaign rally in South Carolina.

“Why, when you had the chance, did you not free the January 6'ers?” he says he asked Mr Trump in footage included in one clip.

J6ers refers to participants in the attack on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, which disrupted a joint session of Congress affirming the 2020 presidential election results.

Ye later retweeted another share from a Twitter user, who had posted the video saying: “Kanye showing some love to the J6 prisoners.”

He also praised ultraconservative white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who was banned from YouTube in 2020 for violating hate speech, and regularly spouts anti-Semitic and white supremacist rhetoric.

Ye's Twitter account was suspended after his anti-Semitic comments, which also saw him taken off Instagram, but reinstated after the platform was bought by Elon Musk last month.

It was not the first time he had been suspended for posting hateful content.