Bill Garlow, the great-grandson of Buffalo Bill Cody, owns two Best Western hotels in Cody, Wyoming. In June, Garlow, who is seventy-eight, found himself sitting in his office across from Kanye West—a Cody resident since 2019—along with West’s cousin and a Yeezy employee. None of them wore masks. “Kanye kept saying, ‘Best. . . West. . . ern,’ ” Lindsay Garlow, Bill’s daughter, who’d sat in on the meeting, recalled. “He didn’t seem to know that it was a chain of international hotels.” West loved the name—and he thought her dad had come up with it. The group spoke for an hour. “They were on their phones the entire time, texting,” she said. “As a teacher, that drives me batshit crazy.” Eventually, Bill cleared his throat, and West looked up. “He wanted to talk to Dad about hospitality,” Lindsay said, “but we weren’t sure where he was going with that.” West further confused the Garlows when he removed one of his Yeezy shoes and passed it across the desk to Bill. “It was weird,” Lindsay said. She noted her dad’s poor health, adding, “I told him to wash up when Kanye left.”
West had spoken to them about his love of Jesus and his idolization of Donald Trump. But he had said little about his Presidential campaign, which he would announce a week later—“Other than a sentence that began, ‘When I am President,’ ” Lindsay said. The Garlows Googled his platform. It includes, as a coronavirus measure, “Stop making God mad.” West is also anti-Planned Parenthood and anti-Black History Month. (At a campaign stop in Charleston, West said, to boos, that Harriet Tubman “never actually freed the slaves.”) The Garlows plan to vote for Joe Biden. “But if it were Kanye versus Trump, I’d vote Kanye,” Lindsay said. “He’s kinder. And he’s been booking us full since January,” with friends and associates. Her father added, “I have half his business. I’d like all of it.”
Unlike Biden, West has announced his running mate: Michelle Tidball, a fifty-seven-year-old white woman from Cody who runs an online Bible study, works in a dental office, and has so far said nothing public about the campaign. To find out more about her, Lindsay Garlow suggested calling Mary L. Keller, a scholar of religious studies at the University of Wyoming. Keller and Tidball attended Cody High in the early eighties. “Michelle was the bubbly, charismatic cheerleader,” Keller said. And she’s smart. “I think she knows Hebrew pretty well.” In 2016, the two women ran a youth group together, and Tidball had talked about her role as an “online prophet.” “We went out for drinks, and she told me about this international group of people who are in touch with the divine and discuss it with each other,” Keller recalled. Tidball also told her that they’d predicted Trump’s victory. Keller laughed at the memory. “To her, his election was evidence.”
When Keller heard about West choosing Tidball, she said, “it made sense. They both believe they have direct access to God and read the world as evidence of that access.” She figured they’d probably met through Tidball’s online prophet network. “The religious imagination is about the only thing that can provide language for drought, flood, fire,” she said, noting an upside. “I see Kanye and Michelle as the kinds of voices that people might turn to for a meaningful story in the face of climate change.” She added, “We’d all be safer with Michelle next to Kanye than we are with Pence next to Trump.”
One local Tidball booster, Wallace Johnson, is a retired lawyer and a former special assistant to Richard Nixon. Years ago, he hired Tidball to run a mentoring program. She was “great with the kids,” he said. He is also a patient at her dental office: “I saw her there just before Kanye’s announcement.” He wasn’t sure where she and West had met. Maybe an airport lounge? “Michelle has spent considerable time studying the Torah, and I’m sure he picked up on that,” Johnson went on. “She’s a wise pick: extremely articulate, likable, and capable. As far from Sarah Palin as I can imagine.” He added, “I never thought Kanye had a theology of his own, but maybe he’s developing one. I don’t want to call it a cult, but that’s what a new religion is. Michelle could help with that. She’s very persuasive.” Starting a religion is easier than running for President. Recently, West tweeted that he may push his run to 2024. “I don’t think we’re about to say that the forty-sixth President lives here in Cody,” Johnson said. “Maybe in four years, but not now.” ♦