By now, you probably heard the news that Kanye West has proclaimed his intent to run for US president in 2020. In a long, rambling acceptance speech at this weekend's VMAs, the Yeezus rapper held forth on Taylor Swift, millennials, being prepared to die for your art and Justin Timberlake, before announcing his tilt at the presidency.

Was it a joke? Most probably, but that didn't stop the usual bout of Kanye-bashing online. 'He's insane!' 'He's an egomaniac!' people cried, as if all of those things can't also be applied to Donald Trump. But is the prospect of Kanye as leader of the free world really as strange as it seems? After all, this is the revolutionary democracy that has given us a cowboy as president, a murderous robot as governor of its most populous state, and a fright-wigged racist as the frontrunner of the ongoing Republican leadership contest. In US politics, policy doesn't matter half as much as the right name and a billion-dollar war chest, and with an estimated $100m net worth - plus nearest-and-dearest including Kim Kardashian-West ($40m) and Jay-Z ($550m) – we're guessing money would not be an issue for Kanye.

But what would it actually be like living in President Kanye's America? And with Hillary Clinton standing a good chance of following her husband into the White House next year, is now the time to start putting money on Kim Kardashian-West for POTUS come 2020? We decided to explore some of the possibilities, based on what Kanye's had to say in the past on some of the key political issues of today.

CRIME

Perhaps Kanye's most thrillingly on-point moment on Yeezus was his bang-OTM takedown (on "New Slaves") of the US's prison-industrial complex, whereby private prison companies rake in vast profits from a system that currently keeps more African Americans under lock and key than there were enslaved in 1850: "They tryna lock niggas up / they tryna make new slaves / See that's that privately owned prison / Get your piece today."

FOREIGN POLICY

According to a (subsequently verified) verse on Cruel Summer posse cut "Clique" (below), Kanye met with former CIA director George Tenet in 2012: “Yeah, I’m talking business, we talking CIA / I’m talking George Tenet, I seen him the other day / He asked me about my Maybach, think he had the same / Except mine tinted and his might have been rented.” Given that Tenet is the man who told George W Bush that there was a "slam-dunk case" for Saddam Hussein possessing WMDs in the run-up to the war in Iraq, he might want to be a bit more careful about who he brags about bragging with.

GAY RIGHTS

Same-sex marriage may be enshrined as a right in US law since a Supreme Court ruling in July this year, but prejudice is still a reality faced by millions of LBGTQ people across the US every day. As one of the first rappers to address homophobia in hip hop – and proud son-in-law to Caitlyn Jenner – we'd like to think he'd work to build on that platform: and really, we'd challenge even the harshest of Kanye critics to watch this recently unearthed video from 2005 and not give props to the guy.

RACE

Given that race has been a defining obsession of his career (remember Hurricane Katrina?), Kanye has remained disappointingly quiet on the wave of protest sweeping the US in the wake of police shootings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. He tweeted a general message of support for the #blacklivesmatter cause in December last year, but has so far refused to be drawn on the topic in interviews, telling The Breakfast Club in February this year that his dad had told him to stay out of it. "I can’t run in front of every bullet," he said, "but (my views) are in the music."

GUN CONTROL

Again, Kanye has been silent on the thorny issue of gun control in the States, though the lyrics on Watch the Throne track "Murder to Excellence" (below), with its acknowledgement of his hometown's spiralling murder rate, nods obliquely to the situation. "I feel the pain in my city wherever I go / 314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago." Leave it to Kim to offer a more forthright criticism of the country's gun laws, in a speech at the Commonwealth Club of California in June this year.

TAXATION

One per center he may be, but Kanye mixed it with the masses at Occupy Wall Street in NYC back in 2011. Given the movement's concern with the widening gap between rich and poor, you might expect Kanye to favour heavy-duty taxes on stinking-rich types such as himself. And yet, on Cruel Summer cut "To The World" (below), he appeared to sympathise with another presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, then under scrutiny for his tax affairs. "These niggas tryna hold me back, I'm just trying to protect my stacks / Mitt Romney don't pay no tax," complained Kanye, who wound up his charitable Kanye West Foundation in 2011, amid questions about its failure to actually, you know, donate any money to charity, despite racking up expenses of more than half a million in 2010.