An old interview of Eminem criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters is going viral in 2025, and many people think it’s for good reason.
The clip, first recorded in 2017, resurfaced on online forums this week, and many users say Eminem’s words feel just as urgent today as they did during Trump’s first term.
Back in December 2017, just a year into Trump’s presidency, Eminem sat down with Complex to talk about his album Revival and the state of America.
Highlights
- Eminem’s critique of Trump’s MAGA base has gone viral eight years after it first aired.
- Eminem warned Trump’s tax breaks favored the wealthy, not the middle class, challenging the loyalty of his supporters.
- Eminem criticized how Trump deepened national division, framing politics as a stark ‘you’re for us or against us’ battle.
- Jack White recently joined Eminem in condemning Trump, calling him a ‘low life fascist.’
Eminem’s 2017 critique of Trump has gone viral on social media
Image credits: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Asked what bothered him most at the time, the Detroit rapper blurted out, “Obviously Trump.”
Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, admitted he struggled to fully put into words why Trump’s grip on his base disturbed him so much. But then he laid it out in blunt terms.
“It’s so bizarre watching him play to his base that thinks that he cares about them, and it’s actually the people that he cares about the f*****g least,” he said.
“If you’re talking about his core being a majority white middle class people, what I don’t understand is how in the f**k do you feel like you relate to a billionaire who has never known struggle his entire f*****g life?”
“Who dodged the draft because he had bone spurs in his f*****g foot?”
Eminem then spoke directly to Trump’s MAGA base: “You feel like this is the guy that’s gonna fight for you? He’s already proven with the tax break that he’s not. That’s not benefiting the middle class. I will say this, he talks a good one.”
At the time, Eminem believed that Trump’s base would shrink as more people recognized what was happening.
But Trump went on to win a second term in 2024, and the loyalty of his supporters has grown even larger. In a recent Financial Times article, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, said their polls found that “the idea that Trump voters ‘regret’ their vote is simply not supported.”
At the same time, while Trump’s base is unified, the Democrats are grappling with internal challenges, including a lack of clear policy direction and a need for fresh leadership.
Image credits: The White House/Flickr
Eminem also spoke about how Trump created a division in the country.
“Part of me feels like it’s almost single-handedly what he’s done, and to the extent that he knows he’s doing it. He obviously sees the division that he’s got our country in.”
“You’re on one side or you’re on the other side,” Eminem said, and this sentiment feels especially true today, as Trump’s politics continue to divide the public into loyal MAGA supporters and those that are aligned with “woke” ideology.
This week, the resurfaced clip drew millions of views and sparked a flood of reactions.
“Respect the hell out of Marshall for this. He’s too smart to fall for the crap. And bold enough to blast it. It’s a declaration by all of us that we aren’t dummies and won’t be corrupted,” one Trump critic wrote.
Eminem said Trump’s grip on the MAGA base disturbed him
Image credits: X
Some fans praised Eminem for speaking out against governments, not just Trump.
“Eminem’s always been pretty politically vocal when he’s not a fan of whose in office. I remember when Bush was president he put out a song called Mosh that literally says ‘F**k Bush’ in it,” a user said.
Others pointed out that Eminem’s credibility came from his own lived experience.
“Em actually comes from the streets, so he would know,” a netizen said.
This isn’t the first time Eminem has targeted Trump.
Image credits: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
In 2018, he told Billboard that a “f*****g turd would have been better as a president.”
And in 2019, he was reportedly interviewed by the Secret Service over lyrics about Trump and Ivanka on his album Revival.
Despite this, Eminem has remained politically active. During the 2024 campaign, he joined former President Barack Obama at a Detroit rally to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump.
Earlier this month, Grammy-winning musician Jack White got into a public feud with the White House that began with criticism of Trump’s new golden aesthetic of the Oval Office, which he called “vulgar” and “gaudy.”
Grammy-winning musician Jack White also recently spoke out against Trump
In his most recent two-page online post, White called Trump a “low life fascist,” “orange grifter” and “professional golf cheat” who is “masquerading as a human.”
“He’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,” the former White Stripes frontman wrote.
Like Eminem, White also addressed Trump’s MAGA base, saying, “He ain’t spending any money on helping YOU unless you fit into his white supremascist [sic] country club rich idiot agenda. Wow, he hates who you hate….good for you, be proud of yourselves, how christian of you all.”
Before White’s anti-Trump treatise, the White House’s Communications Director Steven Cheung called the musician a “washed up, has-been loser” who is “masquerading as a real artist.”
One online commenter applauded the two musicians for speaking up: “Detroit boys Em and Jack White firing away. Keep it up.”