Grammy-winning artist John Legend is at the center of a renewed debate after a video circulated in which he referred to President Donald Trump as a “white supremacist” at an event earlier this year.
The video, which gained traction on social media this week, was filmed at The Fifteen Percent Pledge’s 15th Street Block Party in Hollywood, California, in February 2025. In the footage, Legend critiques Trump’s leadership and addresses the president’s alleged racial views.
“He’s a bigot… It’s a belief that there’s a hierarchy of racial groups and that his group is genetically superior,” Legend said in the video, with the audience responding with applause.
During the same February event, Legend compared former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a four-star general, to Pete Hegseth, a conservative commentator and Trump appointee, suggesting racial bias in Trump’s staffing choices. “That’s the level of bigotry he has—any white man is better than that,” Legend added.
Legend also addressed Trump’s success in the 2024 presidential election. “America made a decision that I strongly disagree with, and it seems that we are reaping the whirlwind right now,” Legend remarked, a few months after Trump assumed office on January 20, 2025.
Legend further described Trump as a “terrible leader, especially in crisis,” asserting the president spends time “blaming, misinforming, and dividing people” instead of finding ways to unite them, he continued.
The context for Legend’s comments includes the recent controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host appointed by Trump to replace Lloyd Austin, the first Black Secretary of Defense under the Biden administration. Hegseth has been criticized for security breaches involving the sharing of sensitive military information in group chats.
Critics have noted that when Austin faced health issues during his tenure, Trump called for his resignation, stating Austin “should be fired immediately for improper professional conduct and dereliction of duty,” Trump declared.
This is not the first instance of Legend publicly criticizing Trump. The musician has a history of opposing the president, going back to Trump’s initial campaign. In 2016, Legend had a notable exchange with Donald Trump Jr. on Twitter, where he directly called Trump Sr. a racist.
“I think they were protesting your racist father. This isn’t complicated,” Legend wrote in response to Trump Jr.’s tweet about protesters at a Chicago, Illinois, campaign rally.
When Trump Jr. suggested that racism “can’t be the answer for everything you don’t like,” Legend responded forcefully. “No. It’s just the answer when racist racists are saying racist s—t and are endorsed by the KKK,” he wrote, referencing Ku Klux Klan members who had endorsed Trump’s candidacy.
In 2019, Legend intensified his criticism following Trump’s comments about Baltimore, Maryland, and Representative Elijah Cummings. “Our president is a flaming racist,” Legend told TMZ outside a Los Angeles, California, nightclub.
The conflict between Legend and Trump became more personal that same year when the president referred to Legend’s wife, model and television personality Chrissy Teigen, as “filthy-mouthed” after she called him a profane name. In response to Teigen’s comments, Trump had called Legend a “boring musician.”
The resurfaced video has elicited strong reactions from social media users across the political spectrum. Many Trump supporters have criticized Legend’s comments as divisive and hypocritical.
“Only a Democrat could claim ‘Trump is divisive’ in one breath and say ‘MAGA is white supremacist’ in the next,” wrote one critic on social media.
Another commenter highlighted what they perceived as media bias: “If President Trump ever said anything like this, it would be played by legacy media on repeat. This is projection 101; John Legend is the divisive racist,” another said.
Legend, whose legal name is John Roger Stephens, has continued his activism on various issues. Most recently, he responded to Trump’s controversial remarks about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
In an Instagram video posted in September 2024, Legend spoke “not as a singer but as a native of Springfield,” praising immigrants as “hardworking and ambitious” and claiming they committed “less crime than native-born Americans.” He urged his followers to “love one another” rather than spread what he characterized as xenophobic rhetoric.
The Fifteen Percent Pledge is an organization founded by Aurora James that challenges major retailers to dedicate at least 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned brands. The February block party was explicitly designed to raise funds in support of Black-owned businesses affected by the Los Angeles, California, wildfires.
