President Donald Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are expected to meet with rapper Kanye West Thursday at the White House, reports The New York Times.
The outlet reports that two people familiar with the plans say West, who recently appeared on Saturday Night Live wearing a Make America Great Again hat, will meet first with Kushner and then have lunch with Trump.
Videos by PopCulture.com
Kushner serves as a senior adviser to the president and has been working on overhauling the criminal justice system; one person briefed on the meeting said West wants to discuss job opportunities for former convicts. He also reportedly hopes to discuss how to increases manufacturing jobs in his hometown of Chicago, where he recently said he planned to return.
The Times reports that a spokesperson for West confirmed the meeting.
It won’t be West’s first time meeting with Trump. West, who has faced criticism for his support of the president, previously met with Trump when he was president-elect before being sworn into office. Neither Trump nor West provided much information on what they met about in December 2016.
“We’ve been friends for a long time,” Trump told reporters. When asked what they talked about, he responded, “Life. We discussed life.”
Trump and Kushner also recently met with West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, about sentencing overhauls. It was at her urging that Trump commuted the life sentence of Alice Johnson, an African-American woman serving time in a drug-related case.
West recently said he hopes to introduce Trump to Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback at the center of the National Anthem kneeling protest controversy in the National Football League. West first mentioned his plan while speaking to TMZ earlier this month, then added that he wants to have a “dialogue, not a diatribe.”
“I’ve been calling Colin this morning, reaching him, so I can bring Colin to the White House and we can remove that s— of b— statement and we can be on the same page,” the rapper said.
West later tweeted about his plans.
“reaching out to Colin Kaepernick. I would like you to speak with the president to tell him your experience directly. Let’s have a dialogue not a diatribe,” he wrote.
Days later, West surprised his fans by deleting all of his social media accounts. His Twitter and Instagram accounts disappeared Saturday, Oct. 6 just before 5 p.m. ET. He did not issue a statement on his decision to leave social media behind.