Jack White has unleashed another salvo at President Donald Trump, calling it a “badge of honor” to be insulted by a White House spokesperson. The musician also expressed incredulity that what prompted one of Trump’s toadies to publicly respond to him was a comment White made about — of all things — the president’s outlandish Oval Office decor.
White shared the lengthy post on Instagram Wednesday, Aug. 20, a day after trading words with White House Communications Director Steven Cheung. That back-and-forth began after White posted a photo of Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, comparing it to “a vulgar, gold leafed and gaudy, professional wrestler’s dressing room.”
That prompted Cheung to fire off a statement calling White a “washed-up, has-been loser posting drivel on social media because he clearly has ample times on his hands due to his stalled career. It’s apparent he’s been masquerading as a real artist, because he fails to appreciate, and quite frankly disrespects, the splendor and significance of the Oval Office inside of ‘The People’s House.’”
White has never shied from criticizing Trump or his admin in the past and even tried to sue the president for copyright infringement over his use of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” at a campaign rally last year. (He eventually dropped the suit.) For that reason, in his new post, he expressed shock that what got the Trump admin to respond to him directly was not him calling out any number of Trump’s offenses, which he proceeded to list at length.
You can, of course, read them all in White’s post, but among the most pointed were: Trump’s “gestapo ICE tactics”; his “disparaging sexist and pedophilic remarks about women”; his links to Jeffrey Epstein and “inclusion in the Epstein files”; his “ignorance of the dying children in Sudan, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo”; his “nazi like rallies”; and his “constant, constant, constant lying to the American people.”
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After all that, White continued: “No, it wasn’t me calling out any of that, it was the fucking DECOR OF THE OVAL OFFICE remarks I made that got them to respond with insults. How petty and pathetic and thin skinned could this administration get? ‘Masquerading as a real artist’? Thank you for giving me my tombstone engraving.’”
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White went on to flip Cheung’s comment back at Trump, saying the president is “masquerading” not just as a human being, but as “a Christian, as a leader, as a person with actual empathy.” And, White continued, he’s been doing this “as a businessman for decades,” prospering “by using other people’s money to find loophole after loophole and grift after grift.”
White ended his post by stating: “Being insulted by the actual White House that this particular conman leads is a badge of honor to me, because anyone who Trump supports and likes is a villain who gives nothing to their fellow man, only takes what can benefit themselves. And no I’m not a Democrat either, I’m a human being raised in Detroit, I’m an artist who’s owned his own businesses like his own upholstery shop and recording label since he was 21 years old, who has enough street sense to know when a 3 card monte dealer is a cheap grifter and a thief.”
