John Legend Calls Trump “Sexual Assailant” In Defense Of ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ Remake

President Trump has called Legend a "boring musician" in the past:

Here's more from Legend's interview with The Guardian:

He knew there was controversy around the original: some radio stations had banned it last winter and it had been cancelled by various factions on the internet. But he thought that changing some lyrics to better reflect our more evolved era, where people are supposed to ask for consent, and include a few other fun modern flourishes, like a plotline featuring an impatient Uber driver named Murray, would be, well: “It would be fun, and it would be newsworthy. And – yeah – it was both.”

Legend is downplaying here. Ever since his version was released last month, people – from Morgan to Dean Martin’s daughter – have lost their minds about it, exclaiming that the rewritten song is a travesty, an affront, a war on culture or the end of culture itself. This, to Legend, is absurd and exasperating. “The song was supposed to be silly!” he says. “It wasn’t supposed to be preachy at all. I never disparaged the old version. And, by the way, the original writer, or his family, gets paid for my version, too.”

Normally, that would be the final word in that particular controversy. But Legend isn’t done with it. He grows thoughtful and leans forward in his seat. He speaks now in a lower, nearly hushed tone. “It’s interesting,” he says, “this whole backlash to the #MeToo movement. People thinking we’ve gone too far speaking up for a woman’s right to not get raped or sexually harassed, when some would argue we’ve not gone far enough, when we have an admitted sexual assailant in the highest office in the land. People think that because some people have lost their jobs, or have been expelled from Hollywood, like Weinstein, that we’ve gone too far. I don’t agree. But people wanted the Baby It’s Cold Outside war to be a proxy war for all that.”

Weird, how that silly, funny song suddenly got very serious. It says a lot about where we are as a hyper-polarised, extremely online society in 2019. It also says quite a lot about who Legend is, not just as a politically engaged entertainer or as a hyper-talented youngest ever EGOT-getter (that’s his Emmy and 10 Grammys and Oscar and Tony ); or as a father of two; or as a husband to the supermodel-slash-Queen of Twitter-slash-disarmingly honest lifestyle guru Teigen. No, the way to understand why it is that Legend can suddenly turn a silly song serious is that these are serious, fearful times. And the only way to match all the fear in our world is with a kind of radical, all encompassing love.

The Independentadded:

John Legend has denied that standing up for immigrants and the #MeToo movement is “virtue signalling”.

                                                                                                                                                                                    

The singer/songwriter has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump and his immigration policies, and rejected claims that he is “preachy” or “moralising”.

                                                                                                                                                                                      

“I don’t know what virtue signalling is supposed to be,” he told The Guardian. “I get that people don’t like people who are overly preachy or overly moralising. But, in my humble opinion, if you care about people who are often undervalued and overlooked in society, what’s so negative about that?

                                                                                                                                                                                          

“There seem to be some who think that standing up for immigrants whose kids are getting locked up in cages is… some might call that virtue signalling and some might think speaking up against it is absolutely right.”

                                                                                                                                                                                      

Legend also expressed his unease with the controversy over the Christmas song “Baby It’s Cold Outside”, which appears on his new Christmas album with some of its controversial lyrics changed.