Yes, last week Kanye West went to the White House and Kanyed.

The troubled rapper and Donald Trump supporter, who was invited to the White House supposedly to discuss heady, important subjects like sentencing reform, was put on display by Trump, who invited the press pool into the Oval Office to bear witness to a rambling, incoherent, cry-for-help rant from the rapper.

It was all just as sad and tragic as one might have imagined. But, for me, too much of the focus afterward was placed on Kanye’s spectacle and not nearly enough on the callous way Trump tried to use and exploit that moment, and the degree to which we have every right to be incredulous about Trump’s manufactured concern for the criminal justice system’s propensity to chew up black lives and destroy them.

In advance of the meeting, Trump called in to the White House propaganda network, and spoke with his daft pep squad on “Fox and Friends,” explaining:

“There are people in jail for really long terms, who have, like Mrs. Johnson as example. She had another 22 years to serve. She was in there for 20 years. She’s the most incredible woman. How this would have happened, and maybe it was a different time, a different age, but we do need reform. And, that doesn’t mean easy. We’re going to make certain categories tougher when it comes to drug dealing and other things. But there has to be a reform because it’s very unfair right now. It’s very unfair to African-Americans. It’s very unfair to everybody.”

He was referring to his granting of clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, a 63-year-old black woman who has been “locked up in federal prison in Alabama since 1996 on charges related to cocaine distribution and money laundering,” as The New York Times reported. Trump did so at the pleading of Kim Kardashian West, Kanye’s wife.