White House responds to Joan Baez poem about Donald Trump
The White House has issued a short four-word response to a Joan Baez poem written about President Donald Trump.
The singer-songwriter published a collection of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance, in 2024. Her latest work, as shared by Rolling Stone, is titled Little Green Worm: A Note to the President. In it, she suggests that a worm may have eaten through Trump’s brain.
In the opening lines of the poem, Baez references Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s Secretary of Health, who said last year that a worm ate at part of his brain, and subsequently died in his head. “Since you are so comfortable / hiring people whose minds have / been hollowed out by worms…” she begins.
Perhaps, Baez muses, the president’s own brain has also been affected by a “little green worm” that has “worked its way into your anterior insular cortex, the part of the brain where empathy originates.”
In the poem, Baez also references comments from the president that have previously caused huge backlash. She writes, “Grab her by the pussy” and / “Shithole countries” or accusing all “Mexican immigrants of being criminals, / rapists, and drug dealers”.
Finally, she finishes, the worm reaches the part of Trump’s brain responsible for basic intelligence to find “oh shit, there’s nothing there”. Responding to the poem in an email to The Independent, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung simply responded, “Who is Joan Baez?”
Earlier this year, Baez made her disdain towards Trump known by supporting Bruce Springsteen’s vocal resistance to the president.
In a recent interview, she explained that the result of the 2024 election “surprised the shit out of me”, adding, “Nobody could have predicted that it would turn into what it’s turned into, because that’s for other countries, the ‘shithole countries.’ This is turning into a shithole country because of them. It’s all the evil things that shithole countries do.”
In April of this year, Baez performed at a rally in support of politicians Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, joining forces with Neil Young and Maggie Rogers to perform ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’.
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