Ugly Dark Twisted Fantasy

All American national third party campaigns that aren’t explicitly of the right are a cat’s paw of the Republican Party, however witfully it may be. In the case of Ye, this was more de jure than de facto:

New documents show Kanye West’s doomed White House campaign—styled as an “independent” third-party effort—appears to have disguised potentially millions of dollars in services it received from a secretive network of Republican Party operatives, including advisers to the GOP elite and a managing partner at one of the top conservative political firms in the country.

Potentially even more alarming? The Kanye 2020 campaign committee did not even report paying some of these advisers, and used an odd abbreviation for another—moves which campaign finance experts say appear designed to mask the association between known GOP operatives and the campaign, and could constitute a violation of federal laws.

At the heart of Kanye’s political operation was Holtzman Vogel, one of the most powerful and well-connected law firms serving major Republican political and nonprofit organizations today. And weaved throughout his campaign, whether the multi-platinum rapper realized it or not, were Republican operatives who may have been less interested in seeing a President West than in re-electing President Donald Trump.

It all seems like farce, but given how close the vote generally is in marginal Electoral College states, the chances of a vanity campaign Nadering things again remains scarily high, and it’s fortunate that this one was too incompetent to get on a lot of ballots.