Don Lemon was so fired up about Kanye West’s Oval Office performance, he couldn’t wait until his primetime show to talk about it.
“Listen, I have no animosity for Kanye West,” Lemon told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday evening. “I'm just going to be honest and I may get in a lot of trouble for it. I actually feel bad for him. What I saw was a minstrel show today.
“Him in front of all these white people, mostly white people, embarrassing himself and embarrassing Americans, but mostly African-Americans, because every one of them is sitting either at home or with their phones, watching this, cringing,” he continued. “I couldn't even watch it. I had to turn the television off because it was so hard to watch.”
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From there, Lemon accused President Donald Trump of “using” and “exploiting” someone who “needs help.” He said, “This has nothing to do with being liberal or conservative, this has to do with honesty. And we have to stop pretending, sitting here on these CNN panels or whatever network panels, and pretending like this is normal and let's have this conversation about Kanye West. Who cares? Why are you sending cameras to the Oval Office for Kanye West?”
Invoking the hypocrisy of figures like Fox News host Sean Hannity, Lemon asked, “Did you send cameras to the Oval Office and carry it live when Common visited the White House?” That was during the Obama administration and “the only people who covered it were Sean Hannity and his band of hypocrites who are now applauding Kanye West,” he said.
“We need to take the cameras away from Kanye and from a lot of this craziness that happens in the White House because it is not normal and we need to stop sitting here pretending that it's normal,” Lemon said. “This was an embarrassment. Kanye's mother is rolling over in her grave.”
According to the CNN host, he texted with a friend of West’s late mother from Chicago who told him, “Donda would be embarrassed by this. She was would be terribly disturbed by this and Kanye has not been the same since his mother died.” Lemon suggested West “needs a father figure,” and clearly does not think that father figure should be Trump.
“We're watching someone's demise in front of our eyes,” Lemon said. “Can you imagine if President Barack Obama had Kanye West or any rapper or any person, entertainer in the oval office who said ‘MF’? Can you imagine? Everybody's heads would be exploding. Not just over at Fox News, not just the conservatives, everybody's heads would be exploding saying, what's happening?”
After West hugged the president, he told reporters present, “Trump is on his hero’s journey right now. He might not expect to have a crazy motherfucker like Kanye West support him.”
“This is not the first time that Donald Trump has denigrated that office,” Lemon added, citing Ted Nugent’s presence. “And today was another example of that. He is disrespecting the Oval Office more than Kanye did because he invited Kanye in and exploited it.”
