As President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 has sent shockwaves through the political and international spheres, a wave of cultural voices pushed back with sharp criticism.
From actors and directors to musicians and talk-show icons, these celebrities have used their platforms to call out what they view as the dangers of Trump’s rhetoric and leadership style.
Here are eight of the most notable figures who have spoken out, what they said, and why their criticism resonated.
These eight celebrities have spoken out and raised warnings against the Trump administration
Image credits: The White House/Flickr
Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres has been a celebrity with broad cultural influence for decades, so her personal criticism of Trump in 2025 had a big impact.
She revealed that she and her wife, Portia de Rossi, chose to permanently relocate to the UK because Trump was voted back into office.
Image credits: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
“We got here the day before the election and woke up to lots of texts from our friends with crying emojis, and I was like, ‘He got in,’” DeGeneres said during a live conversation from England in July. “And we’re like, ‘We’re staying here.’”
DeGeneres also expressed concern over efforts in the U.S. to undermine LGBTQ+ rights, explaining that “The Baptist Church in America is trying to reverse gay marriage.” She added that she and De Rossi were “already looking into” getting married again in the U.K. if those rights were rolled back.
Bruce Springsteen
American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen has always carried the mantle of a chronicler of American life, and in 2025, he used his platform to deliver one of his most direct political rebukes yet. Opening a show with the E Street Band, the Boss condemned Trump’s government in stark terms.
Image credits: Shirlaine Forrest/Getty Images
“In my home, the America I love, the America I've written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration,” Springsteen said. “Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism, and let freedom ring!”
Later in the same show, Springsteen warned audiences of censorship and repression: “There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.”
He grounded his commentary in hope later, but the crux of his message was: the country he’d written about for half a century was in peril under Trump’s leadership.
Rosie O’Donnell
Comedian and talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell, a stern critic of Trump, was on the receiving end of a dramatically escalated feud with the president when he threatened to revoke her U.S. citizenship on Truth Social.
Trump claimed she was “a Threat to Humanity” who should “remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland.”
Image credits: Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images
O’Donnell’s response was blistering:
“The president of the usa has always hated the fact that i see him for who he is – a criminal con man sexual abusing liar out to harm our nation to serve himself – this is why i moved to ireland – he is a dangerous old soulless man with dementia who lacks empathy compassion and basic humanity- i stand in direct opposition all he represents- so do millions of others – u gonna deport all who stand against ur evil tendencies – ur a bad joke who cant form a coherent sentence,” she wrote on Instagram.
In a follow-up post, she posted a photo of him with Jeffrey Epstein, calling Trump “king joffrey with a tangerine spray tan” before vowing, “I’m not yours to silence
i never was.”
Pedro Almodóvar
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar used his Chaplin Award acceptance speech in New York to condemn Trump as “the greatest mistake of our time.”
He said he had even questioned whether it was “appropriate” to come to the U.S. at all under a “narcissistic authoritarian leader who doesn’t respect human rights.”
Image credits: Kate Green/Getty Images
He added that it seems like “nothing can stop on his [Trump’s] race to change fragile world balance.”
“Trump and his friends, millionaires and oligarchs, cannot convince us that the reality we are seeing with our own eyes is the opposite of what we are living, however much he may twist the words, claiming that they mean the opposite of what they do,” he said.
Jack White
Grammy-winning musician Jack White bashed the president in a two-page Instagram post, calling Trump a “low-life fascist.”
White said Trump was “masquerading as a Christian, as a leader, as a person with actual empathy.”
Image credits: Kevin Kane/Getty Images
“He’s [Trump’s] been masquerading as a businessman for decades as nothing he’s involved in has prospered except by using other people’s money to find loophole after loophole and grift after grift,” White added, before attacking Communications Director Steven Cheung and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt as “professional liar toadies” and accusing them of “covering up and masking [Trump’s] fascism as patriotism and fomenting hatred and division in this country on a daily basis.”
“This man is a danger to not just America but the entire world and that’s not an exaggeration, he’s dismantling democracy and endangering the planet on a daily basis,” White said.
“I was raised to believe that we defeated fascism in World War II and that we would never allow it again in the world,” White said, calling Trump an “orange grifter.”
In another passage, White spoke directly to Trump’s supporters, saying, “He ain’t spending any money on helping YOU unless you fit into his white supremacist [sic] country club rich idiot agenda. Wow, he hates who you hate....good for you, be proud of yourselves, how Christian of you all.”
Robert De Niro
Actor and director Robert De Niro said in October about the No Kings protest that “there’s no other way to face a bully”.
Speaking to MSNBC, De Niro called for more resistance, saying, “The politicians are going to recognize that: either face the wrath of Trump or the wrath of the people—and they have to be more afraid of the wrath of the people.”
He said Trump seeking a third term had to be opposed.
Image credits: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
We cannot let up on him because he is not going to leave the White House. He does not want to leave the White House. He will not leave the White House. Anybody [who] thinks, ‘Oh, he’ll do this, he’ll do that,’ is just deluding themselves.”
“It’s a classic bully situation,” De Niro added. “We see it, and there’s no other way to face a bully. You have to face him and fight it out and back them off and back him down. That’s the only way this is going to work.”
“King Donald the First. F**k that. We’re rising up again … We’re all in this together, indivisible with liberty and justice for all,” De Niro said in an earlier video.
Jimmy Kimmel
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel has been one of the most consistent comedic critics of Trump. Immediately after Trump’s inauguration, he called the presidency a “national nightmare,” and his nightly monologues have continued to skewer Trump’s policies and personality.
Recently, Kimmel went on a long monologue about Trump’s late-night posting rampages.
Image credits: Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images
“He went completely off the rails last night,” Kimmel said on December 2. “The man who's allegedly running the country banged out an onslaught of posts and reposts in a furious social-media blitzkrieg ... It’s an average of every two minutes for five hours straight.”
Displaying a screenshot of every post Trump shared, Kimmel joked, “That’s what he did last night. Do you know how long you have to be on the toilet to post that much? I mean, what is he eating?”
He also joked about chlamydia being better than Trump’s Truth Social platform, before adding, “Here’s what I wonder: what was Melania doing during this five-hour manic Monday marathon? Hiding under the Christmas tree?”
Sophie Turner
Though British actress Sophie Turner is not American, she spent years living in the U.S. during her marriage to Joe Jonas. Like Ellen, the politics of the Trump era played a central role in her decision to move back to the U.K.
She told Harper’s Bazaar that “everything just kind of piled on,” from “the gun violence” to “Roe v. Wade being overturned.”
Image credits: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images
She had described feeling like a “little bird trapped in a gilded cage,” and the breaking point came when she imagined what it would be like raising her children in a place marked by mass shootings and diminishing reproductive rights.
“I couldn’t fathom being a mother of one of those children [in the 2022 Uvalde school shooting] knowing that this was something your country could fix, that they’d rather have rights to guns than give kids a right to life,” Turned said.
“Meanwhile, women in the U.S. are being stripped of their rights, left, right, and center. It all contributed to this feeling of I have to get out, I have to get out.”