GOP candidate Ben Carson did not shoot down the possibility of Kanye West becoming president some day, saying he’s “certainly willing to give him a chance.”
“We’ll see. He’ll be able to explain things and we’ll see if he resonates with the people,” Carson said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.
At the 32nd MTV Video Music Awards in August, West announced he will be running for president in 2020. In a Vanity Fair interview, published last week, West said Carson is “the most brilliant guy,” and that he had been trying to get in touch with him for a few weeks.
Carson, who is inching closer and closer to Donald Trump’s lead in the polls, said on Sunday he had the chance to speak with West and that he was impressed with his business experience.
Related: Ben Carson nabs big fundraising haul after Islam comments
“I talked to him about the possibility of maybe himself and some of the other people in the pop culture doing some — some music that might be uplifting, that might give young women a sense of their value and young men a sense of responsibility,” Carson said.
Carson’s comments come just a week after he said he “would would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.”
Carson readdressed that controversial comment on Sunday, saying the media leaves out the part where he said he would support a person of any faith as president, as long as that person accepts American values and principles and subjugates their religious beliefs to the Constitution.
He repeated that he believes the teachings of Islam are not compatible with the American Constitution. “What I would like for somebody to show me is an improved Islamic text that opposes sharia,” Carson said. “Let me see — if you can show me that, I will begin to alter my thinking on this.” In the same interview, Carson failed to provide evidence for his recent remarks that many immigrants crossing the Southern border of the United States are “hardened criminals’’ from Iraq, Somalia and Russia. “I talked to a number of the sheriffs on the borders and they’ve told me what kind of people are coming over,” he said. Despite data that shows most immigrants are coming from Mexico and Central America, Carson said he would not trust “any figures coming from the government, given the fact that they’re the ones who are problematic.”
Nicole Brown Recommended
