"[R]egardless of the effectiveness of [Kanye] West’s precise words, he does represent something — and that something is frightening to Democrats."

"Heaven forbid a successful, independent, young African American with a huge social media following would get out of line and gleefully support Trump. Watching the liberals panic has been kind of fun.... CNN’s coverage was particularly hysterical, alarming and insulting. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) went so far as to question West’s sanity for meeting with the president. 'I felt like I was sitting in on a psychiatrist visit and a commercial for Donald Trump,' she said. Eager to pile on, CNN host Don Lemon ranted against West on Thursday, saying he put on a 'minstrel show' for the president, in essence questioning the legitimacy of West’s blackness. Even before West’s Oval Office meeting, CNN commentator Tara Setmayer said, 'He’s the token Negro of the Trump administration.' Another CNN commentator, Bakari Sellers, in an apparently botched and distasteful reference to a decades-old Chris Rock bit, said, 'Kanye West is what happens when Negros don’t read.'... All of this kind of reminds me of the infamous 2009 'beer summit' when President Barack Obama convened a Harvard professor and Cambridge police officer to discuss race relations and racial profiling. But that gathering accomplished nothing aside from providing the media with a feeding frenzy of contrived coverage. So if Obama could have his beer summit to do nothing, Trump and West can meet in order to stir the pot and see what happens. This will be interesting to watch. I hope the Trump and Kanye show continues."

Writes Ed Rogers at WaPo. Rogers is a GOP consultant who worked in the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush administrations. I quoted him because he summed up the CNN coverage concisely, and because he's right that the Democrats are not helping themselves by making such a big deal out of the West-Trump meeting and inviting disrespect for West. But Rogers's leaning back and enjoying the "show" isn't much different from Don Lemon's calling it a "show" (except that Don Lemon, tappng his own racial privilege as a black man, called it a "minstrel show").

Here's a Jonathan Chait piece from July 2017: "I Have Found America’s Worst Columnist" ("Ed Rogers is a Washington lobbyist, and, for reasons I have never been able to discern, a regular op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.... First, as founding member of a lobbying firm with a wide-ranging portfolio and a presumably enormous income, literally everything he writes suffers from crippling conflicts of interest. Second, he is a terrible writer whose arguments lack any originality, persuasive power or, quite often, even facial plausibility").

I don't know about that, but here's what I'm thinking about Kanye West and Trump. West is an artist. Words flow out of him in a way that doesn't make you want to give him any political responsibility but that reaches your emotions. You can distance him and laugh at him and deem him crazy. But you can also be with him and hear him and love him, which is what Trump did. We watched West open up to Trump, trust Trump with his inner, artistic self, and we watched Trump accepting that connection and intimacy. Trump gave West access to the Oval Office, and West determined how to use that access, and Trump let West happen in his presence. Many onlookers felt uncomfortable, but they are, perhaps, condemned by their own discomfort.

I'm going to give this my "Trump's genius" tag.