Kanye West Media Trainer Jumps Ship Following “TODAY” Meltdown

Let the fallout begin: Kanye West has suffered his first major loss following last week’s meltdown on The TODAY Show. According to The New York Post, the damage-control media trainer West hired specifically to prepare him for his interview resigned shortly after the debacle.

She’d been working for the rapper for just three days.

West sat down with Lauer on Tuesday for an interview that aired on Thursday during he had to answer questions on five-year-old remarks he had made branding former President George W. Bush a racist in the wake of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster. Knowing the nature of the interview, Kanye sought the expertise media advisor Susie Arons — Executive Vice-President at Rubenstein Communications — to help him through the interview. Arons was with Kanye doing the final rounds of rehearsals before the interview — oddly enough, these preparations did little to keep West’s sometimes explosive temper in check.

“West shut himself in a dressing room with Susie and could be heard rehearsing possible questions and answers, but the interview began, and it was as though he had crammed for a test and then his mind went blank,” an insider tells The Post’s Page Six Column.

Arons resigned on Friday morning and a few hours later Kanye took to Twitter to announce that he was cancelling his Black Friday concert on TODAY. He stands by his assertion that he was victimized by the show and by Matt Lauer, who Kanye believes did not allow him to express his views completely and kept on intervening with some new topic while the previous was yet be completed.

Yeezy will, however, forge ahead with plans to release his fifth studio album — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — on Nov. 22. It remains to be seen how the hip-hopster’s latest public tantrum will impact its sales.