Almost a month into his purported presidential run, Kanye West has yet to make an appearance with the mysterious woman who he’s claimed will be his running mate.
In fact, Wyoming-based “biblical life coach” Michelle Tidball doesn’t seem to have acknowledged that the rapper has added her to his independent ticket — other than a July 15 tweet in which she acknowledged that West was running for president — even as West continues to sputter in his attempts to add his name to the ballot in a handful of states.
It’s all amid reports that Republican activists in half a dozen states are helping him get on the ballot via an operation run by Pres. Trump’s allies and Republican activists trying to divert votes from presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Which begs the question: who is Tidball and why is West running with her on his Birthday Party ticket? She appeared to have joined Twitter in July 2017, but as of press time, her feed included only retweets from West and retweets of stories about West’s run.
Though Tidball did not return repeated requests from Billboard for an interview, we’ve gathered as much information as we could find about the 57-year-old Abundant Ministries founder, who reportedly has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Wyoming.
Her day job involves an online bible study program
According to the official Michelle Tidball Ministries site Yarash (a Hebrew word from the Old Testament that translates into “to inherit,” “to take possession of” or “to devour/ruin”) she is a personal life and spiritual coach focused on “creating the future in the present” with business/life and relationship coaching as well as help overcoming “obstacles and addictions.” In describing what Yarash means, Tidwell says her site is not for “the compromised, seeking popularity, wanting to lounge and take it slow, or not wanting to rock the boat. This is about activated faith, moving mountains and taking position!”
She claims to have a number of degrees
Though her biography page is currently blank, according to Forbes, it previously claimed that Tidball, who is white, had “various degrees in mental health and criminal justice” and that she worked as a “mental health therapist for 10 years” before becoming a life coach; she charges $65 per 50-minute session. According to the New Yorker, Tidball also works in a dental office.
She lives in the same town as ‘Ye
Tidwell’s contact address is in Cody, Wyoming, the same town where West lives on his 4,000-acre West Lake Ranch.
She thinks mental illness can be cured by doing chores
In audio from 2017 obtained by TMZ (which appears to have been removed from the Yarash site), Tidwell says one way to treat mental illness is with discipline and by doing chores. “If you would get up every day and make your bed and do your dishes, you would be better,” she explained, saying that in her decade of working with the mentally ill she found that they rarely made their beds or did the dishes.
She almost died as a child before finding God
In another part of her bio (also since seemingly removed) Vanity Fair reported that Tidwell said she has pursued God her whole life, including the time she was “six months old and my mother awoke to find that I was slipping away into a crib death. In a hospital tent God first visited me and spoke life which I can still recall today…. At seventeen I made the decision to follow Him all the days of my life!”
A former high school friend said Tidwell was a cheerleader who predicted Pres. Trump’s ascent
Mary L. Keller, a scholar of religious studies at the University of Wyoming, attended Cody High with Keller in the early ’80s and she described her as the smart, “bubbly, charismatic cheerleader,” who had a strong command of the Hebrew language. The two women ran a youth group together in 2016, according to the New Yorker, and Tidball talked about being an “online prophet.”
Keller told the magazine that they went out for drinks and Tidball “told me about this international group of people who are in touch with the divine and discuss it with each other.” Even harder to believe, Keller said Tidball told her that the shadowy group had predicted reality star/real estate mogul Donald Trump’s presidential victory. “To her, his election was evidence,” Keller said.
Her Twitter follows include a notorious “male supremacist”
According to her unverified account, which links to the Yarash site, she, of course, follows West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, as well as Forbes magazine (which has posted the only extended interview with the rapper about his presidential run to date).
Tidwell also follows West’s on-and-off backer Tesla founder Elon Musk, the Wyoming Bureau of Land Management, the state’s Senators, Governor, Lt. Governor and Mike Cernovich, who the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a former alt-right figure and “male supremacist” who is “one of America’s most visible right-wing provocateurs, known for boosting or generating massively successful conspiracy theories like #Pizzagate. He made his career on trolling the liberal establishment by accusing people of pedophilia or child sex trafficking.
