John Legend isn’t pretending there’s any love lost between his household and the White House
The EGOT winner says the man sitting in the Oval Office knows that better than anyone.
Legend and his wife Chrissy Teigen have spent years as outspoken critics after watching Trump turn personal grievances into public battles. Now, the “Ordinary People” singer is using one of Trump’s own explosive moments to make his point.
Legend sat down with “The Breakfast Club” and didn’t bother sugarcoating it either.
He believes Trump knew exactly where the couple stood from day one.
But one story from Trump’s first term had people running the clip back. It involved Teigen, a single tweet and a behind-the-scenes request that didn’t come to light until years later.
To understand why, you have to go back to September 2019.
Legend had appeared on an MSNBC special about criminal justice reform hosted by Lester Holt. There he talked up FREEAMERICA, his campaign to end mass incarceration, according to Business Insider.
Trump had signed the bipartisan First Step Act into law months earlier.
He was apparently watching and fuming that he wasn’t getting the credit. In a late-night tweetstorm, he called Legend a “boring musician” and took a swipe at “his filthy mouthed wife.”
The POTUS complained the couple was celebrating the reform, “but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed.”
Legend fired back in a post on X by mocking Trump for hate-watching MSNBC on a Sunday night and pleading with the first lady to step in. “Melania, please praise this man. He needs you,” he wrote.
Teigen, on the other hand, didn’t ask anybody to calm Trump down. Her response was short, and it would eventually end up in front of Congress.
“lol what a p—y a– b—h. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president,” Legend’s wife wrote at the time. It was a dig at Trump for blocking her on Twitter back in 2017. By the next morning, her insult had turned into a trending hashtag.
Now, seven years later, Legend says the president didn’t take it well.
“He already knows we hate him. We’ve been his enemies since the first term,” Legend said on the show. “I call him out, I talk s—t about him. We know who he is, we’ve seen who he was from the beginning, we saw it living in New York and knowing he was on some bulls—t then.”
Then came the line that had social media talking. “He went after Chrissy when she called him a p—y a– b—h,” Legend continued. “He kinda was a p—y a– b—h about it because he tried to get Twitter to take it down.”
In February 2023, former Twitter content moderation official Anika Collier Navaroli testified before the House Oversight Committee. She said the Trump White House had reached out to the platform about Teigen’s post. The administration wanted it gone “because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president,” she said, according to NBC News.
The irony wasn’t lost on anyone. Republicans had called the hearing to grill Twitter over the Hunter Biden laptop story and claims that it censored conservatives. Instead, the testimony revealed a sitting president trying to get a celebrity’s tweet scrubbed because it hurt his feelings. Twitter never took it down.
Once Legend’s clip started circulating online, plenty of fans were here for his thoughts on Trump years later. “My favorite thing from Legend since ‘Ordinary People,’” one person joked.
Another user wrote, “John Legend isn’t guessing. He clocked Trump in New York, called it then, and kept calling it.”
A third admitted, “…didn’t know the Legend had it in him. I’m totally impressed! Seeing him through new eyes.” A fourth cheered, “Love he will not be intimidated by the orange ghoul.”
Legend was sounding the alarm on Trump long before the president ever came for his wife. Back in 2016, while Trump was still on the campaign trail, Legend connected his rise to 19th-century pro-slavery politicians.
Four years later, during a performance for the Democratic campaign, he called out rappers who backed Trump, saying they’d slipped into “the sunken place.”
Last October, Legend went viral for a sarcastic Instagram video “supporting” Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize dreams.
In it, he laid out everything the president would have to stop doing to actually earn one, from sending troops into Democrat-run cities to going after his political opponents.
If Trump was hoping the couple would quiet down in his second term, Legend’s latest interview makes one thing clear. They haven’t, and they won’t.
