Why did Jay-Z call Donald Trump a “superbug”?
Jay-Z was an open supporter of Barack Obama while he was president, so, for obvious reasons, he was dismayed when Donald Trump inherited the role for the first time in 2017. His opposition to Trump in those days even spilled into a public spat.
Trump’s rhetoric regularly caused media scandals during his first administration, as when he described several African nations, Haiti and El Salvador as “shithole” countries. The comments were widely condemned when they became publicised, and they specifically sparked a reaction from Hov.
Speaking to CNN, Jay-Z characterised Trump’s words as “hurtful” and “misinformed,” but he conceded that they were representative of a much deeper problem than simply Trump’s own prejudices. This was indicative of issues at the heart of the United States itself.
Jay brought up the case of Donald Sterling, the businessman who owned the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Sterling had been caught on tape speaking in a racist manner in 2014, for which he was banned by the NBA. This, Jay felt, was akin to spraying “perfume on the trash can.”
What he meant was that the issue of racism in America was much more serious than the remarks of this one man. The NBA could ban this specific individual, but that would do little to solve the actual problem. Jay then went on to draw this trash can analogy out when speaking about Trump’s own attitudes.
“You don’t take the trash out, you keep spraying whatever over it to make it acceptable,” he said. “As those things grow, you create a superbug. And then now we have Donald Trump, the superbug.”
Jay, clearly conscious of being seen to deploy the same sort of dehumanising language for which Trump himself is known, clarified that he recognised that, for all his faults, Trump was still a person. “Somewhere along his lineage,” he said, “something happened to him. Something happened to him and he is in pain and he is expressing it this sort of way.”
Jay’s words do seem somewhat prescient today. Whether or not one agrees with his politics, he at least seemed to realise in 2018 that the conditions leading people to support figures like Trump were not being adequately addressed by the political class of the time. The trash was being sprayed, but nobody was taking it out.
The fact that Trump would later return for a second stint as president indicates that the grievances that propelled him to power in the first place were, indeed, never properly addressed. The consequences for that are presently playing out.