Grammy Award-winning musician John Legend is at the center of controversy after a video reemerged showing him labeling President Donald Trump a “white supremacist” during an event earlier this year.
The footage, which started to circulate widely on social media this week, was recorded at The Fifteen Percent Pledge’s 15th Street Block Party in Hollywood, California, in February 2025. In the video, Legend criticizes Trump’s leadership approach and comments on the president’s 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, which received applause from the audience.
In the same February appearance, Legend compared former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a four-star general, with Pete Hegseth, a conservative media figure 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.
During his remarks, Legend addressed Trump’s victory 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 stated, just months after Trump assumed office on January 20, 2025.
Legend further characterized Trump as a “terrible leader, especially in crisis,” accusing the president of “blaming, misinforming, and dividing people” instead of uniting them, which Legend described as a “smart and responsible and good political way to handle it.”
The context for Legend’s comments includes the recent controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth, a former Fox News host, was appointed by Trump to replace Lloyd Austin, the first Black Secretary of Defense under the Biden administration. Hegseth has recently faced criticism for security breaches involving sharing 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 singer has a history of opposing the president, starting during Trump’s initial campaign. In 2016, Legend engaged in 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 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 escalated his criticism following Trump’s tweets about Baltimore, Maryland, and Representative Elijah Cummings. “Our president is a flaming racist,” Legend told TMZ outside a Los Angeles, California, nightclub.
The feud between Legend and Trump became more personal that 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 condemned 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.
Legend, whose legal name is John Roger Stephens, continues his activism on multiple fronts. 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,” endorsing immigrants as “hardworking and ambitious” and stating they committed “less crime than native-born Americans.” He urged his followers to “love one another” instead of spreading what he termed xenophobic rhetoric.
The Fifteen Percent Pledge is an organization founded by Aurora James that challenges major retailers to allocate at least 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned brands. The February block party was organized to raise funds in support of Black-owned businesses affected by the Los Angeles wildfires.
