In many demonstrable ways—for better or worse—she already is. But if she were to pass the bar, it would be the most surprising rebranding since Barbie got woke, a case to be studied at Harvard Business School for years to come. (Indeed, she has been invited to speak at Harvard later this year “on branding and media.”) At Casa Vega, I bring up the fact that the Kardashian name has come to stand for something negative to a lot of people: shallow, acquisitive, all that is wrong with our culture. “I don’t pay attention to that anymore,” she says, sipping a frozen strawberry margarita. “I love to be put in a situation where I can have a conversation with someone who might not be inclined to think much of me, because I can guarantee they will have a different opinion and understand what’s important to me after they’ve met me.”

Our booth feels almost too public, and I am surprised that no one makes a fuss—until toward the end, when two blonde identical twins approach, cell phones at the ready, prattling on about using her lipstick and OMG we love you SO MUCH; Kim, as mellow as ever, leans in for a couple of selfies but does not overindulge the twins, partly because she seems a little self-conscious by the attention they have now drawn—as we sit talking about prison reform. She’s telling me about discovering Alice Marie Johnson through a video her friend posted on Twitter. “Alice found me,” she says. “It was meant to happen.” Like many people in California, Kim can slip into the jargon of a vague spirituality that wants to provide easy answers for the unexplainable twists and turns of life. But she is also a Christian—her mother often starts the daily family group text with a verse from the Bible—who seems to hold a deeply felt sense of injustice. “Here’s a grandmother who took part in her first-time nonviolent offense and received the same sentence as Charles Manson. I just thought, This is so wrong and so bizarre, and how could that be? I sent it to my attorney and said, ‘What can we do? Does she need better lawyers?’ ”

Before long, she was in touch with the group from #cut50. “I made a decision to go to the White House when everyone was telling me, ‘Don’t go, your career will be over; you can’t step foot in there.’ And I was like, ‘It’s my reputation over someone’s life?’ Weigh that out. People talk shit about me all day long. It will just be another story about me versus someone getting their life back.” Once Johnson was released and after a major bipartisan piece of criminal justice–reform legislation, the FIRST STEP Act, was passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump in December, Kim was able to glimpse a new future for herself. “I never in a million years thought we would get to the point of getting laws passed. That was really a turning point for me.”