What is Kanye West's 2018 White House Visit?

It's the October 11, 2018 Oval Office meeting where Kanye West wore a MAGA hat and monologued to President Trump on live TV, spawning a batch of image-macro and photoshop memes.

Where did Kanye West's 2018 White House Visit come from?

The visit itself was a real White House lunch broadcast by the press pool on October 11, 2018, and the memes emerged the same day on Twitter and Reddit.

What does Kanye West's 2018 White House Visit mean?

It's shorthand for the surreal Oval Office moment, most often invoked through the '000000' passcode gag or the phone-showing photoshop base image.

How do you use Kanye West's 2018 White House Visit?

People typically edit the still of Kanye showing Trump his phone by swapping the on-screen content, or caption stills with Kanye's 'Superman' and 'male energy' lines from the broadcast.

Is Kanye West's 2018 White House Visit still popular?

It's a classic 2018 political meme still referenced when Kanye and Trump make headlines together, especially the '000000' password joke and the r/photoshopbattles edits.

Kanye West's 2018 White House Visit

2018eventclassic

Published September 3, 2026

On October 11, 2018, Kanye West sat in the Oval Office next to President Donald Trump wearing a MAGA hat, declaring the cap made him feel like Superman while riffing on alternate universes. The televised meeting instantly spawned photoshop battles, handshake edits and the enduring joke that Kanye's iPhone passcode was just '000000'.

kanye west memes trump memes photoshop memes political satire memes 2018 memes

Overview

Kanye West's 2018 White House Visit refers to the mid-October Oval Office sit-down where the rapper, wearing a red 'Make America Great Again' cap, delivered a rambling monologue to President Donald Trump about hydrogen planes, alternate universes and male energy while cameras rolled1. The footage was strange enough on its own that the raw broadcast circulated as a meme before anyone edited a single frame2.

The visit produced two distinct meme veins. The first was the reaction-quote genre, powered by Kanye's line that the MAGA hat made him feel like 'Superman'1. The second was the image-macro side, dominated by a single wide shot of Kanye leaning across the Resolute Desk to show Trump something on his iPhone, which became the base plate for hundreds of photoshop edits3.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Cable news broadcast (source event) / Twitter and Reddit (viral spread)

Date

2018

The catalyst event took place on October 11, 2018, when Kanye West joined Donald Trump in the Oval Office for a lunch meeting that turned into a roughly ten-minute press availability broadcast live on cable news1. Seated across from the president and surrounded by reporters, Kanye monologued about time, masculinity and his 'Superman' MAGA hat, and at one point unlocked his iPhone on camera to pull up a picture of a hydrogen-powered plane1.

The meme moment crystallized within hours: viewers on Twitter froze the frame of Kanye showing Trump his phone, and Redditors clipped Kanye typing his passcode in full view of the pool cameras4. Both images escaped the news cycle and entered general-purpose meme rotation the same afternoon.

How It Spread

That evening, Twitter user @SteveKopac posted the now-infamous clip pointing out that Kanye's iPhone password appeared to be the digit 0 repeated six times, a tweet that pulled more than 4,500 likes and 1,900 replies in its first 24 hours1. The '000000' passcode joke jumped platforms fast and is still the single line most people remember from the meeting2.

Parallel edits spread on Twitter. Political reporter @bennyjohnson mashed the meeting up with the Epic Handshake template from the film Predator, turning the Kanye/Trump grip into a bicep-flexing brotherhood gag5. Other rap figures weighed in the same day, with Questlove, 50 Cent, Don Cheadle and Sean 'Diddy' Combs among the celebrities who fired off responses that were collected into a Twitter Moment6.

On Reddit, user pennser posted the phone-showing still to r/photoshopbattles and asked the community to have at it. The submission cleared 25,700 points at 86 percent upvoted with roughly 890 comments in its first day, most of them chained edits of Kanye's screen showing everything from Club Penguin to nuclear launch codes3. Fox News amplified the story that night when Tucker Carlson devoted a YouTube-uploaded segment titled 'The intolerant left attacks Kanye West's White House visit' to the meeting7.

▶

Watch Video

How to Use This Meme

The photoshopbattles format is the easiest entry point: grab the wide shot of Kanye leaning over the Resolute Desk holding out his phone to Trump, then swap whatever you want onto the phone screen3. The other common convention is the quote card, typically pairing a still from the broadcast with the 'Superman' or 'male energy' line pulled from Kanye's monologue1. For the passcode joke, the setup is usually a screenshot of the unlock moment captioned with the six zeros1.