Kesha has called President Donald Trump a “criminal predator” and condemned the White House’s use of her song “Blow” in a pro-war TikTok video.
“It’s come to my attention that The White House has used one of my songs on TikTok to incite violence and threaten war [prior to the Iran conflict],” Kesha, 39, wrote via her Instagram Story on Monday, March 2. “Trying to make light of war is disgusting and inhumane. I absolutely do NOT approve of my music being used to promote violence of any kind.”
Her response came three weeks after the White House released a combat-heavy TikTok video set to her 2011 hit. The video featured Kesha singing the lines, “Tonight, we’re taking names / ‘Cause we don’t mess around / This place about to blow,” over footage of real fighter jets dropping bombs on an aircraft carrier.
“Love always trumps hate. Please love yourself and each other in times like this,” Kesha wrote on Monday. “This show of blatant disregard for human life and quite frankly this attack on all of our nervous systems is the opposite of what I stand for.”
The two-time Grammy nominee took a parting shot at Trump with a reference to him appearing in the Epstein Files.
“Don’t let this distract us from the fact that criminal predator Donald Trump appears in the Files over a million times,” she concluded.
White House director of communications, Steven Cheung, responded to Kesha by tweeting: “All these ‘singers’ keep falling for this. This just gives us more attention and more view counts to our videos because people want to see what they’re bitching about. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
“Kesha quotes are like Popeye’s Spinach to this team. Memes? They’ll continue. Winning? Will also continue,” White House deputy communications director, Kaelan Dorr, added.
Trump is mentioned in numerous files and seen in photos that were released by the Justice Department from late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate. (Epstein died by suicide at age 66 in August 2019 after being arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.)
One photo released by House Democrats in December 2025 featured Trump posing with five women whose faces were all redacted, while another showed a bowl of Trump-themed condoms. (The Justice Department offered no context on when or where the photos were taken.)
At the time, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Us that House Democrats were “selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions to try and create a false narrative.”
“The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked and the Trump Administration has done more for Epstein’s victims than Democrats ever have by repeatedly calling for transparency, releasing thousands of pages of documents, and calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends,” Jackson told Us in December 2025. “It’s time for the media to stop regurgitating Democrat talking points and start asking Democrats why they wanted to hang around Epstein after he was convicted.”
Meanwhile, Kesha has joined a growing chorus of artists who have clashed with Trump’s White House for appropriating their music without permission. In December 2025, Sabrina Carpenter called the administration’s action “evil” after they included her song “Juno” in a social video promoting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ deportation efforts.
“This video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter, 26, tweeted at the time. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”
Olivia Rodrigo commented directly underneath one such video in November 2025 after ICE used her song “All American Bitch” to promote their pro-deportation agenda.
“Don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda,” Rodrigo, 23, demanded.
The most recent artists to tangle with the Trump administration were alternative rock icons Radiohead, who told the Department of Homeland Security to “go f*** yourselves” when the organization used the band’s 1997 track “Let Down” in a pro-ICE video.
“We demand that the amateurs in control of the ICE social media account take it down,” Radiohead said in a joint statement to NBC News in February. “It ain’t funny, this song means a lot to us and other people, and you don’t get to appropriate it without a fight.”
In the past, the White House has admitted to purposefully invoking popular music to anger its political opponents. Administration officials publicly rejoiced over social media outrage at using Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia” in a video celebrating Trump last November.
“We made this video because we knew fake news media brands would breathlessly amplify them,” a White House official told Us at the time. “Congrats, you got played.”
