Kendrick Lamar’s honest opinion of Donald Trump
After Donald Trump first got elected as US president in 2016, much of the country, not to mention the world, was left struggling to explain what had happened. Kendrick Lamar was among them.
Speaking to i-D in 2017, not quite a full year after the result had become known, Kendrick struggled to find a logic for what had happened at the polls. He couldn’t comprehend that the public had come to embrace this man.
“We all are baffled,” he said of his fellow Americans, or at least those who hadn’t voted for Trump. “It is something that completely disregards our moral compass.”
Kendrick was famously an admirer of Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, and they even met and maintained contact with each other. Trump seemed to actively present himself as the antithesis of Obama and everything he stood for, so it is entirely predictable that Kendrick would look poorly upon Trump and his behaviour.
Kendrick argued that the main ways in which Trump and Obama differed were “morals, dignity, principles [and] common sense” — hardly the most unimportant things for a world leader to deal with.
Trump’s apparent inability to connect with other human beings was also a massive concern for Kendrick. “How can you follow someone who doesn’t know how to approach someone or speak to them kindly and with compassion and sensitivity?” he pondered.
Back in 2017, Kendrick claimed that Trump’s rise had sparked something in him that drove his art forward. “It’s just building up the fire in me,” he said at the time. “It builds the fire for me to keep pushing as hard as I want to push.”
Kendrick’s status as a leading artist of his generation only increased in the years since Trump’s first administration, which is why he was selected to play the Super Bowl halftime show in 2025. That occurred only shortly after Trump took office for a second time, and, in the show’s wake, many people came to suspect that Kendrick had used it to take shots against the president.
At one stage during the show, Kendrick said, “The revolution is about to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy.” Many people have understood this to be a reference to Trump, which, given his past despair about his rise to power, seems a reasonable assumption.