While most sane observers have been questioning the political wisdom of Kanye West, one imagines there’s nobody more confused than his wife, Kim Kardashian. West, after all, has been exhibiting some perplexing behavior of late. Earlier this month, he gave a temple-scratching performance in the Oval Office, where he entertained Donald Trump and dozens of reporters with a muddled diatribe in defense of the president and his own mental health. More recently, after quitting Twitter and Instagram, he re-activated his social-media accounts to post a video about “mind control.”
Kardashian, of course, has talked openly about her disapproval of West’s newfound political orientation. But she has also capitalized on her husband’s relationship with Trump to advance her own political agenda. Earlier this year, she began talking with both Trump and Jared Kushner about prison reform, a topic she cares about deeply. An Oval Office meeting with Trump culminated in the president pardoning Alice Johnson, a 63-year-old woman who had been serving a life sentence for a first-time nonviolent drug charge since 1996. Since then, as my colleague Emily Jane Fox has reported, Kardashian has been in near-daily contact with Kushner or White House staff members to push for additional pardons. In September, she returned to the White House for a listening session on clemency and prison reform.
In a new interview with Richardson magazine, Kardashian speaks candidly about how she is trying to extract some moral good from the strange political situation. “I am aware that Kanye speaking out in favor of Trump got me through the door—got him to pick up my call,” Kardashian says. “I’ve always had different opinions than Kanye. But when I went there, and when I saw what could be done, I realized that I could get more done if I just stayed focused on the issue I was passionate about instead of complaining.”
Some may question the moral logic, if not the political wisdom, of an alliance with Trump. On a more prosaic level, the West-Trump relationship seems decidedly off-brand for the famously controlled Kardashian-Jenner clan. But as Kardashian explains in the interview, with American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, she has her own philosophy when it comes to dealing with challenges and setbacks in her life. “Everyone deals with things differently, and I seem to deal with things—whether the sex tape, the robbery, even the death of my dad, who was the most important person in my life—I push to just overcome it,” Kardashian said. “I just don’t have a victim mentality. That’s never been my personality.”
