Donald Trump is a 77-year-old man who likes show tunes and can’t dance. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for some reason (probably a profound lack of self-awareness) Trump keeps picking fights with some of the coolest and most popular musicians on the planet.
While Trump has flaunted his friendships with stars like Ye, Kid Rock, and Ted Nugent, much of the music community is, unsurprisingly, quite negative on the former (and possibly future) Republican president. Dozens of musicians have criticized his politics and tried to make him stop using their songs at his rallies. Ignoring this would be the smart move, but Trump can’t just “shake it off” — even though the artist usually emerges from these feuds unscathed while Trump looks pathetic.
Here’s a rundown of Trump’s most high-profile, self-destructive music beefs.
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Takes on John Legend, gets cursed out by Chrissy Teigen.
Trump started this classic Twitter feud because John Legend wasn’t talking about him. In September 2019, the musician appeared during a MSNBC town-hall event on criminal-justice reform. A short time later, Trump posted a four-tweet rant complaining that the “boring musician @johnlegend, and his filthy mouthed wife,” Chrissy Teigen, didn’t praise him for signing the First Step Act.
The special actually did discuss the First Step Act and Teigen wasn’t featured. The couple quickly hit back at Trump, with Legend mocking him for having nothing better to do than tweet at him, and Teigen lobbing a memorable expletive-laden insult:
Trump was widely perceived as the loser of this exchange. As Ani Bundel put it in a NBC News opinion piece at the time, “The president brought a knife to a social-media gunfight and came off looking weak — and at the hands of a woman of color to boot.” Trump was mocked over the exchange again last year when former Twitter executives told the House Oversight Committee that the Trump White House demanded that the site take down Teigen’s tweet “because it was a derogatory statement directed toward the president.”
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Leaves office fuming about Snoop Dogg.
Trump and Snoop Dogg have had a tumultuous relationship. It started out playful: The rapper appeared on a 2007 episode of The Apprentice and joked about Trump toying with a 2012 presidential run at the mogul’s Comedy Central roast. Then when Trump actually did run for president in 2016, Snoop openly supported Hillary Clinton. During Trump’s first year in office, the rapper criticized his policies and parodied the president, releasing a music video that showed him pointing a gun at a clown called “Ronald Klump.” Trump responded:
Snoop then bashed Trump in the single “M.A.C.A. (Make America Crip Again).”
Over the years, Trump apparently forgot about this beef — but it all came rushing back in the final days of his administration. Snoop had successfully lobbied the White House to commute the sentence of his friend Michael “Harry-O” Harris, the co-founder of Death Row Records. The paperwork was drawn up days before Trump left office in 2021, when he was reminded that the rapper had said a lot of nasty things about him and started raging all over again, as Rolling Stone revealed in February 2024:
“Well, fuck him,” Trump moaned about Snoop Dogg in the closing days of his term, according to a former administration official and another person who heard him say it.
With just hours left before Biden’s inauguration, Trump’s renewed fury at the rapper set off a frenzied effort both in and outside of the White House to convince Trump that Snoop Dogg wasn’t, in fact, mad at him anymore. The effort lasted almost literally until the final minute of the presidency. Failure to move Trump would have cost the freedom of one of the co-founders of the legendary hip-hop record label Death Row Records, who at the time had been behind bars for three decades.
Snoop resisted suggestions that he grovel to Trump, either publicly or privately, but advocates for Harris’s release managed to dig up “unreleased footage of Snoop Dogg saying complimentary things about Trump.” That satisfied the president, and Harris was put back on the pardon list.
So while Trump stressed about whether Snoop still liked him, the rapper ultimately freed his friend without kowtowing to the president (though Snoop did say in a January 2024 interview that he now has “nothing but love and respect” for Trump).
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Gets into a fight with Beyoncé & Jay-Z over their language.
Trump’s many clashes with Beyoncé and Jay-Z usually follow this pattern: He accuses the couple of being vulgar and claims he draws bigger crowds. They respond months or even years later by campaigning for his opponent and including some clever anti-Trump lyrics on their Grammy-winning albums.
Trump spent the final days of both the 2016 and the 2020 campaigns complaining about the couple. After Bey and Jay endorsed Clinton during a concert and rally on November 4, 2016, Trump responded at his own event, “So she got Jay-Z and Beyoncé and the language they used was so bad. The language. The language was so bad. And as they were singing — singing right? Singing? Talking? Was it talking or singing? I don’t know. But the language by both, but the language was so bad that many of the people left.”
When asked about Trump reportedly describing African nations as “shithole countries” in 2018, Jay-Z called Trump a “superbug.” The president tweeted:
Jay-Z responded with these lines on Everything Is Love, the Carters’ joint album released later that year:
Your president tweeting about Hov like he knows us
My road to the top was to take what you owe us
I give a fuck what that man find vulgar
Just look in my eyes when you toast us
Trump brought up the couple’s 2016 concert again in the final days of the 2020 campaign, in which they endorsed Joe Biden. “They got Beyoncé,” Trump said, mispronouncing the singer’s name. “And they got Jay-Z, right, Jay-Z? And he started using the F-word … F-word, F-word, F-word.”
Beyoncé later celebrated seeing people line up at the ballot box to vote Trump out, singing on her 2022 album Renaissance, “Votin’ out 45, don’t get outta line.”
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Gives Lady Gaga & Jon Bon Jovi a bad name.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z weren’t the only Biden-supporting stars who Trump went after at his 2020 election-eve rally. He suggested that he knew some kind of secret damaging information about Lady Gaga and claimed Bon Jovi always “kisses my ass.”
Both artists continued to publicly criticize Trump and performed at events celebrating Biden’s inauguration, with Gaga singing the national anthem.
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Mocks Rihanna from his failing social-media site.
Rihanna criticized Trump throughout his administration, calling him “most mentally ill human being in America,” blocking him from using her music at rallies, and posting photos on Instagram that appeared to show her spray-painting “FUCK TRUMP” on a truck.
Trump tried to hit back during the 2023 Super Bowl, proclaiming that Rihanna’s widely lauded halftime performance/pregnancy announcement was actually “the single worst Halftime Show in Super Bowl history”:
Trump shared this post on Truth Social, where he had only 5 million followers at the time, compared to Rihanna’s 107.9 million Twitter followers.
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Begs Taylor Swift to root for the anti-hero.
Taylor Swift famously tried to stay out of politics, but by the end of his administration she felt compelled to publicly denounce him for “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism” and endorse Biden in 2020.
Amid chatter about whether Swift might back Biden again, Rolling Stone reported last month that Trump was obsessing about whether he’s more popular than Time Magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year:
Behind the scenes, Trump has reacted to the possibility of Biden and Swift teaming up against him this year not with alarm, but with an instant projection of ego. In recent weeks, the former president has told people in his orbit that no amount of A-list celebrity endorsements will save Biden. Trump has also privately claimed that he is “more popular” than Swift is and that he has more committed fans than she does, a person close to Trump and another source with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone.
Last month, the source close to Trump adds, the ex-president commented to some confidants that it “obviously” made no sense that he was not named Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year — an honor that went to none other than Swift in December.
Trump could have played it cool, ignoring reports that he’s in a one-sided popularity contest with the pop star. Instead, he posted this on Truth Social hours before the Super Bowl:
Taylor has yet to give any signs on who she’s endorsing in the 2020 election. And who knows, maybe this time Trump’s embarrassing exchange with a megastar musician will finally work.
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