Run The Jewels’ Killer Mike defends Kanye West for meeting with Donald Trump

Watch Run The Jewels discuss Kanye’s meeting with the president as well as their thoughts on grime.

Run The Jewels’ Killer Mike has defended Kanye West’s heavily-criticised decision to meet with Donald Trump in December.

In an interview with Channel 4 News, Killer Mike said: “It didn’t bother me, why wouldn’t you [meet the President]? Black people shouldn’t have permanent friends or enemies, they should have permanent interest. If it wasn’t for Dr. Martin Luther King being willing to meet with people like [Governor] George Wallace, Wallace would have not have ended up – starting as a racist bigot and ending as a person who found God in some way, and appointed more blacks to his office than any other governor since.”

As a long-term civil rights activist, Killer Mike’s words carry weight. The rapper campaigned for left-wing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders during the US presidential election and has been a prominent voice of the Black Lives Matter movement, penning a Billboard op-ed in 2014 on the militarisation of the US police.

But he also pointed out that public figures with a history of campaigning and activism meeting with Trump may be more significant than West: “A musician meeting a presidential candidate isn’t important to me, unlike [former NFL player] Jim Brown,” he continued. “Brown, for the last 50 years, has fought against oppression of all people. Him sitting with President Trump was a significant thing for me, because I know on the other side of the table he was telling the truth.”

In the same interview, Killer Mike’s Run The Jewels bandmate El-P spoke about his love of grime ever since the genre’s early days: “I worked with Dizzee Rascal back in the day – he was kind of my entrance into the grime scene, and, you know, people like Wiley and the earlier stuff. And I’m a fan of it.”

Run The Jewels have just finished a UK tour in support of their third album as a duo, RTJ 3.