Kanye West Disses “Hillary Clinton’s Ex-Boyfriend” Pete Davidson

Kanye West is going through a divorce with Kim Kardashian, his wife of nearly seven years and the mother to their four children. Divorce, famously one of the hardest emotional journeys a person can experience, is likely exponentially more tumultuous when both parties involved happen to be some of the most famous people on the planet. West, who now goes by Ye, is coping in his own ways; he’s recording new music, throwing baby Birkin bags around Manhattan’s East Village, and most recently, making the funniest, pettiest digs against his soon-to-be ex-wife’s current boyfriend, comedian Pete Davidson.

Since Davidson and Kardashian allegedly began dating following her hosting Saturday Night Live back in October 2021, Ye has made it crystal clear that he’s not down with their relationship. The rapper jabbed at the comedian with the lyric “God saved me from that crash, just so I could beat Pete Davidson’s ass;” he crossed out Davidson in a group photo with him, Timothée Chalamet, and Kid Cudi, then banned the latter from joining his forthcoming record Donda 2 due to his friendship with Davidson. And now, he came back with a dig that is at once so clever and so out of left field that one simply has to laugh. In a now deleted Instagram post, Ye referred to Davidson as “a dickhead” and left his audience with a musing: “I wonder if Instagram gonna shut down my page for dissing Hillary Clinton’s ex-boyfriend.”

Ye aiming his ire at the comedian through the lens of one of Davidson’s tattoos, a portrait of Hillary Clinton, is somehow the funniest possible turn to this seemingly one-sided celebrity feud. It’s a galaxy-brain level dig that only a Gemini could whip up; it’s both silly and powerful, cutting and full of levity. Rarely do disses hold such duality, and even though publicly feuding in the midst of a high-profile divorce is probably not the best idea Ye’s ever had, it’s an incredible jab that is now part of the cultural canon at large, right up there with the time fellow Gemini Azealia Banks called Grimes a “brittle-boned methhead” who “smells like a roll of nickels.”

Jokes aside, the dig also serves as a reminder that at the end of the day, Ye is simply a man who is going through it in a very public setting. Of all the emotions a divorced person could feel, pettiness is fairly low-stakes. Disliking your ex’s new lover is a universal human experience! The sting of being called “Hillary Clinton’s ex-boyfriend” is a spiritual one at most, and ‌Davidson will likely find a way to weave it into his own standup routines in due time. And for those of us who aren’t Ye’s divorce lawyers or his mental health professionals, all there is to do is observe the wit and laugh.

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