It seems so long ago, but it has been only a week since Mr. West came out of the closet as the same-dragon-loving, Trump-supporting, slave-shaming, alt-fact fire breather. Last weekend’s “Saturday Night Live,” hosted by the actor and musician Donald Glover, turned Mr. West’s weeklong trolling into the horror film it felt like. But ending the week laughing at Mr. Glover’s sendup of Mr. West hasn’t made watching him unravel any less infuriating or heartbreaking.
Mr. West thought his recent return to Twitter after an almost yearlong hiatus, with relentless contrarian, stream-of consciousness tweets from the minuscule Negro corner of the alt-right world, would read like a takeover of Twitter. But that’s not how the platform works. Black Twitter runs Twitter, and Black Twitter swiftly handed Mr. West his lunch. Mr. West was reading the blowback and did exactly what a person does when he or she is losing — he dug in.
Like Mr. Trump, who also brags about not reading books, Mr. West is parroting the racist right-wing talking points he has learned from watching YouTube videos. The same white power wing nuts who trolled him for years as a way of defending Taylor Swift’s honor are now over the moon to hear the rapper blame President Barack Obama for not ameliorating gang violence in Chicago, to see Mr. West at the office of the gossip website TMZ blaming his own enslaved ancestors for their enslavement.