“And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president.”

A moment that caught the attention of everyone in the arena and at home watching on the television. Did Kanye West just announce a presidential campaign?

West was awarded the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, an award he definitely deserved with the amount of work he has put into his career. Like he said in his song “Spaceship,” “Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers. That’s a Different World like Cree Summer’s. I deserve to do these numbers.”

He’s delivered many amazing music videos, whether they have no real meaning like “Bound 2”, or videos that aim to send a message like “Diamonds from Sierra Leone.”

Taylor Swift presented the award to West, for obvious reasons. To those out of the loop, at the 2009 VMAs, West interrupted Swift when she won the award for Best Female Video, claiming that Beyonce deserved the award because she had “one of the best videos of all time.”

Junior Youssef El Boukri said that he was just as shocked as Swift was when it happened. “I knew Kanye but I didn’t think Kanye would do anything like that.”

Swift gave him the award with joy, and said she has been a fan of West for a long time. She explained how the first album she ever downloaded on iTunes was West’s College Dropout album.

West accepted the award and started the speech, embarking on a journey that would take the crowd on a wild ride for the next 13 minutes. He began to talk about his encounter with Swift six years prior, showing some regret for his actions. He considers that maybe if he had a daughter at the time, he wouldn’t have confronted Swift that year.

He admitted a mistake that he made in the speech, saying, “The problem was the contradiction. The contradiction is I do fight for artists, but in that fight I somehow was disrespectful to artists.” He explains how he was already in a state of shock when Swift won because he witnessed Justin Timberlake and Gnarls Barkley both lose, both of whom he favored to win their respective awards.

He goes on to talk about how MTV kept using the fact that Swift was presenting the award to him in order to get better ratings on television, something he obviously did not approve of.

He continues by drifting off to a different subject (how award shows give artists that worked their whole life “the opportunity to be considered a loser”), and then starts randomly rambling for a little bit before admitting that he smoked a little bit before coming on stage.

After more rambling about how his generation needs to teach it’s successors better, he reveals his 2020 presidential campaign.

Senior Shank Rai is skeptical about West running for president. “Kanye has done great things in the music industry, but politics is very different.”

Overall, it was a truly engaging and entertaining speech delivered by one of the most iconic entertainers of this generation, given because of an award that he worked tirelessly for.