Paul McCartney is bewildered by Donald Trump’s presidency: “You wouldn’t have thought they could get away with it”
Paul McCartney has shared his shock at the ongoing actions of Donald Trump’s administration.
McCartney, aged 83, has lived through just about everything and has seen it all, yet nothing could have prepared him for the former host of The Apprentice becoming president, as well as everything that would arise as a repercussion of that.
During a new interview with The Guardian, McCartney opened up about his bemusement at the state of the world, sharing, “Who would’ve ever thought you’d have an American president like that?”
He then singled out Pete Hegseth’s official governmental job title, Secretary of War, as another reason to be dismayed about the world in 2026, adding, “You wouldn’t have thought they could get away with it. Or the secretary of war? That I can’t believe.”
Nevertheless, despite his thoughts on Trump’s administration, McCartney has not lost hope in humanity, sharing, “I still think humanity’s got great resilience and great spirit, and most of the people I meet are cool, good, nice people, family people.”
McCartney continued, “I think we all have reasonably similar values. And often, if I’m writing a love song, I think, ‘Oh, this is not local. They’re doing this kind of thing in China. They’re falling in love and having babies.’ It’s a human thing. So I have every hope that we’ll get through it.”
The music icon’s latest comments on Trump come after he recently spoke about his joy of bringing people together across the political divide at his concerts, even if it’s only for one night only.
He told the Rest is Entertainment, “And particularly these days – you do something like ‘Hey Jude’, and you see the whole audience singing together. In Trump’s America, where Republicans and Democrats are at each other’s throats – when we do that song, they’re not. They’re all loving it.”
McCartney added of the power of music to bring people together, “And it’s like, wow. Suddenly, this room has forgotten all of that. We’re not going to argue; we’re just going to sing together. Those kinds of things, I think, are valuable.”
Additionally, as far back as 2017, McCartney took on Trump over his stance on climate change, stating that it was a crucial time to fight for a better world “when you’ve got someone like Trump who says that it (climate change) is just a hoax”.
Meanwhile, McCartney’s new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, is out today (May 29th). In a four-star review, Far Out observed, “On one hand, The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a good but not great collection of songs, but on the other, also perhaps the best album ever recorded by an 83-year-old?”
It adds, “I’ve always imagined that McCartney must find it odd to be asked every day about things he did 60 years ago, considering how much he’s done since. But as it turns out, what he really wants to talk about was stuff that he did 70 years ago.”
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