For the dozens of political journalists clustered inside and outside the White House on Thursday, watching Kanye West pontificate in front of Donald Trump was like watching the Resolute Desk get desecrated in real time. “Kanye just said ‘motherf***er’ in the Oval Office,” an appalled Jim Acosta tweeted, only one of the jaw-dropping remarks the legendary rapper proffered that afternoon during a lengthy, disjointed ramble: his red MAGA hat made him feel like he was wearing a “Superman cape”; he was going to convince Apple to “work on” a hydrogen-powered plane; and he was going to show the world that the “eternal return” was Trump‘s “hero’s journey,” because “time is a myth.” (Trump, himself a prolific rambler, was shocked into silence for most of it.) Occasionally, he would bring up the reason he was in the White House to begin with—to have a frank discussion with Trump about prison reform—but he would end up on yet another tangent about Trumpism and whatever else came to mind at the moment. “You’re tasting a fine wine. It has multiple notes to it,” he explained. “You better play 4-D chess with me like it’s Minority Report . . . It ain’t that simple. It’s complex.”

It was the latest in West’s erratic, whiplash-inducing Valkyrie ride through pop culture in the year 2018, one that’s forced most of his fans to re-evaluate his legacy. Complicating matters is the question of West’s mental health, which he once attributed to bipolar disorder, but which he told Trump was actually a case of sleep deprivation. (“All jokes aside, I thought that was really sad,” CNN’s S.E. Cupp said afterward. “I think you had there a man who’s clearly not O.K., and a president who’s willing to exploit that.”) But in spite of that overhanging question—or perhaps because Trump’s critics felt moved to ask it—Kanye’s communion with Trump was a coup: an intellectual homecoming of epic, unprecedented proportions for the fans of the Trump administration and the foes of liberalism. Within minutes of West leaving the White House, PragerU, the slick, right-wing, how-to site, tweeted a video saying it was “rarely wise” to doubt the rap legend. “His tweets exposed more people to eye-opening realities ignored by the mainstream media,” they wrote, pointing to his attacks on Barack Obama (a longtime Yeezy critic) for doing nothing to reduce crime in Chicago. “The Left has taught black Americans to be victims rather than to be self-reliant, but Kanye West is awakening black Americans to the broken promises of the progressive Left.”

Whereas the rest of the pearl-clutching media saw a once-respected rap artist having a meltdown in the Oval Office, the world of MAGA and its attendant subcultures—the Intellectual Dark Web, the Breitbart/Fox crowd, the millennial trolls of Turning Point USA—saw something else: a black man, a true cultural icon, a rapper once hailed by liberals for attacking George W. Bush, saying the things they said and believing the things they believed, never mind exactly how he came to those conclusions. West’s sermon was a distillation of that message, in a form that he acknowledged was “from the soul.”

Of course, what gave the Trump fan base the biggest high was not what West said, but how the “opposition party” reacted. There was the predictable glee in seeing the self-serious media lose their minds over watching a deranged celebrity in the White House (one who, for once, was not Trump), mostly expressed in the form of endless memes. Several conservative luminaries and their allies bashed the media for speculating about West’s mental state, while others criticized commentary that at times verged on cruelty. “Why the f did [she do that], other than to embarrass Kanye?” asked Fox News reporter Brian Flood, after CNN’s April Ryan reached out to Ray J—the man who starred in Kim Kardashian West’s famous amateur porn tape—to weigh in.

The content of Kanye’s message, itself, made the emotional response on the right even more telling. During his various rants, West hewed closely to their favored arguments, attacking the Democratic Party for their grip on the black vote (“A liberal would try to control a black person through the concept of racism”), the virtues of nationalism (“[America] has to be the freshest, the flyest, the flyest planes, the best factories”), and the closing of the liberal mind (“You think racism can control me?”). But he also spoke unusually candidly about the psychology that drew him to Trump, whom he praised for reversing the supposed feminization of the culture: