Kanye West Announces He’s Running for President in 2020

At Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West accepted the Video Vanguard Award.

Kanye announced he was running for president in 2020 before dropping the mic and leaving the stage at the end of an epic acceptance speech for the lifetime achievement award.

Taylor Swift had presented Kanye with the Video Award and people thought it would be the strangest part of the night given their history. The 38-year-old famously rushed the stage when Taylor Swift accepted an award back in 2009, claiming that his friend Beyonce was a more worthy recipient. But not until Kanye’s speech happened.

Here’s a rough transcript of his speech and the video of the epic moment:


First of all, thank you, Taylor, for being so gracious and giving me this award this evening. And I often think back to the first day I met you also.

You know, I think about when I’m in the grocery store with my daughter and I have a really great conversation about fresh juice, you know? And at the end, they say, “Oh, you’re not that bad after all.” And like, I think about it sometimes, it crosses my mind a little bit when I go to a baseball game and 60,000 people boo me. It crosses my mind a little bit. I think if I had to do it all again, I think, what would I have done? Would I have worn a leather shirt? Would I have drank that half a bottle of Hennessy and gave the rest to the audience? If I had a daughter at the time, would I have gone onstage and grabbed the mic from someone else’s hand?

You know, this arena, tomorrow it’s going to be a different set-up. Some concert, something like that. This stage will be gone. After that night, the stage was gone. But the affect that it had on people remained.

The problem was the contradiction. The contradiction is, I do fight for artists, but in that fight I somehow was disrespectful to artists. I didn’t know how to say the right thing. The perfect thing.

 I just sat at the Grammys and saw Justin Timberlake and Cee-Lo at the Grammys lose. Gnarls Barkley and FutureS3xLoveSounds, the “SexyBack” album. And Justin, I ain’t trying to put you on blast, but I saw that man in tears, you know? And I was thinking, he deserved to win album of the year!

And this small box that we are as the entertainers of the evening, how could you explain that? Sometimes I feel like all this shit they run about beef and all that, sometimes I think I died for the artists’ opinion, for an artist to be able to have an opinion after they were successful.