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On Wednesday's Today interview with George W. Bush, Matt Lauer played a short clip of Kanye West apologizing for calling Dubya a racist. The former president told Lauer that he'd forgiven West, and that was that.
But it was far from over from the hip-hop star's point of view. The interview -- which aired in full on Thursday -- was a set-up to make him look bad and force him to apologize to Bush. Even worse, he says, they played the clip of Kanye stealing the mic from Taylor Swift at last year's VMAs... while he was trying to say, "I'm sorry."
"I went up there to express how I was empathetic to Bush because I labeled him a racist and years later I got labeled as a racist," Kanye tweeted on Tuesday evening. "While I was trying to give the interview they started playing the 'MTV' under me with audio!"
West continued by turning his anger on Matt Lauer.
"HE TRIED TO FORCE MY ANSWERS," said Kanye in his trademark all-caps font. "IT WAS VERY BRUTAL AND I CAME THERE WITH ONLY POSITIVE INTENT."
And then, Kanye got poetic with his tweet:
"I feel very alone very used very tortured very forced very misunderstood very hollow very very misused."
When the full interview that got West so enraged finally aired on Today on Thursday, it's more clear why he got frustrated. Lauer prodded him about what he would say to Bush if he met him -- and somewhat manipulatively asked him to watch a clip of the reporter's interview with Bush to see how emotional he got during their talk (see clip below).
But what really riled West up was when talk turned to his being labeled a racist after his infamous MTV Video Music Awards incident with Taylor Swift and producers played a clip of that moment while he was talking -- standard talk-show fare.
"Yo, how am I supposed to talk if you gonna run this thing in the middle, while I'm talking?" West lashed out while stopping mid-sentence. "Please don't let that happen again, it's like ridiculous."
During his closing segment on Thursday's Today show, Lauer addressed that moment. "It's something we do every day -- when a guest is talking about an incident or a location, we run video of that," Lauer says. "There was nothing improper about it, nothing unusual about it whatsoever."
