“Trump, when it comes to giving a shit, you’re as stingy as I am,” Eminem rapped in “The Storm” at the BET Hip-Hop Awards. For some, the comparisons didn’t stop there. Since Em drew that line in the sand between himself and Trump supporters critics accused him of “tapping into the same disaffected white rage later mobilized by the ‘alt-right.'”
In a new Billboard cover story that features Em and longtime manager-turned-Def Jam CEO Paul Rosenberg, the self-proclaimed “Rap God” redraws that line.
“When I [put out “The Storm”], I felt that everybody who was with [Trump] at that point doesn’t like my music anyway. I get the comparison with the non-political-correctness, but other than that, we’re polar opposites. He made these people feel like he was really going to do something for them. It’s just so fucking disgusting how divisive his language is, the rhetoric, the Charlottesville shit, just watching it going, ‘I can’t believe he’s saying this.'”
Most non-Trump supporters can recall the moment during the campaign trail where Trump appeared to jeopardize his chances of being elected. For Eminem, as hinted during “The Storm,” that was when Trump said that Arizona Senator John McCain, who spent five and a half years in captivity during the Vietnam War, is a war hero “because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
“When he was talking about John McCain, I thought he was done,” Em said to Billboard. “You’re fucking with military veterans, you’re talking about a military war hero who was captured and tortured. It just didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. And that’s some scary shit to me.”
