Natalie Maines delivers foul-mouthed Trump rant on-stage

Natalie Maines of the country music icons The Chicks issued a blistering rant about President Donald Trump this week. In a foul-mouthed tirade posted to Instagram on Monday, the 51-year-old country singer called Trump, 79, a ‘fugly [expletive]’ and warned that ‘our democracy is disappearing right before our eyes.’ Maines one of the earliest victims of so-called ‘ cancel culture’ delivered her rant 23 years after she said on stage that her band, then known as The Dixie Chicks, was ashamed of former President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.The political outburst led the trio which also includes sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire to be banned from thousands of country music stations and kicked off a wave of death threats directed at them. The Daily Mail has reached out to the Trump administration for comment.

Maines concluded by urging her followers to share her post to ‘help the message live,’ and she referenced Representative Jamie Raskin’s claim to Axios in February that his search for ‘Trump’ in a database of unredacted files relating to Jeffrey Epstein garnered over one million search results. Raskin later clarified that he had searched for the terms ‘Trump,’ ‘Donald’ and ‘Don,’ and he said that not every search result necessarily referenced Trump. Maines added hashtags for ‘democracy,’ ‘freespeech’ and ‘fugly [expletive].’ Her fury appears to have been sparked by news that the president, his sons Don Jr. and Eric and the Trump Organization had filed a lawsuit against the Treasury and IRS in the Southern District of Florida in response to the leak of their tax returns.

In exchange for dropping the lawsuit, the IRS agreed to create a $1.776 billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund,’ which will be able to issue formal apologies and provide monetary relief to claimants. The fund will be governed by a five-member commission appointed by the Attorney General, who was appointed by Trump. Trump will also have the power to remove any member from the commission. While Trump is technically barred from directly receiving payments from the fund, entities associated with him are not explicitly prohibited from filing additional claims. The settlement drew immediate fury from Democrats, among them Senate Finance Committee member Ron Wyden, who said the move represented a brazen new level of corruption. ‘Even by his standards, the move he’s trying to get away with now is a stunning act of corruption,’ said Wyden. ‘What Trump wants is a $1.7 billion slush fund for right-wing political violence and subversion, and if he follows through, it will be the most brazen theft and abuse of taxpayer dollars by any president in American history.’

Maines’ criticism of the current president comes more than two decades after she attacked George W. Bush for the start of the second Iraq War. ‘Just so you know, we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas,’ she said on stage at a concert in London. Her comments and the backlash to them from fans and corporate country radio stations led to a rapid commercial decline for The Chicks. They also faced pushback from other country artists who were publicly supportive of Bush and the Iraq War, among whom Toby Keith was one of the most vocal. Maines subsequently issued an apology for her remarks, but in 2006 she rescinded it.

‘I don’t feel that way anymore,’ she said in an interview with Time. ‘I don’t feel he is owed any respect whatsoever.’ The Dixie Chicks later shortened their name to just The Chicks in June 2020, following years of criticism over the connections ‘Dixie’ has to the history of slavery in the US. The Chicks also cited protests brought on by the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement as inspirations to change their name. The group claimed they had wanted to change ‘that stupid name’ for years after they settled on it while they were still in their teens.