What did Tupac Shakur say about Donald Trump?
Tupac Shakur was raised a radical, whose politics later formed a core part of his music—especially his earlier works. But he was happy to address political issues head-on, too, and that led him, in a 1992 interview, to speak ill of one Donald J Trump.
Trump, in those days, was still a couple of decades away from launching his political career, but he was certainly in the public eye. He was a sort of avatar for American capitalism, always the subject of tabloid fodder, and more than happy to show off his lavish lifestyle and wealth. He was, in many ways, the antithesis of a young Tupac.
During a conversation with MTV in 1992, Pac spoke about what he viewed as gross inequality in the United States at that time—and Trump’s name soon came up.
“If you want to be successful, if you want to be like Trump,” he said, declaring what it takes to become rich, “gimme, gimme, gimme. Push, push, push. Step, step, step. Crush, crush, crush. That’s how it all is, it’s like nobody ever stops.”
Trump personified the avarice of America’s elite at their worst, from Pac’s perspective, and he viewed his greed as a disgrace, in light of the poverty suffered by so many throughout America. “I feel like there’s too much money here,” he said. “Nobody should be hitting $36 million on the lottery and there’s people starving on the streets. That’s not idealistic, that’s just real.”
To reiterate his point, Pac also brought up someone closer to home as an example of America’s problem with wealth inequality—Michael Jackson.
“There’s no way Michael Jackson or whoever Jackson should have a million thousand, quadruple billion dollars when there are people starving,” he said. “There’s no way these people should own planes and there are people who don’t have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants.”
Wealth inequality has intensified throughout the United States since Tupac’s day, so, while his concerns had clearly started to shift towards the end of his life, it is certainly possible that this subject would have been on his mind today, had he survived. Moreover it seems certain that he would have had some fairly strong thoughts on President Trump.
What Pac would have made of his fellow rappers, like Nicki Minaj, coming out to publicly endorse Trump isn’t entirely clear, either. But given that he was willing to call out Michael Jackson, a Black icon, for hoarding his wealth, it seems fair to suggest that he wouldn’t have been shy about calling out Trump-supporting rappers today. But we’ll never truly know.