Two musicians thoroughly reviled by Donald Trump just topped Spotify’s list of the most streamed music acts of all time.
Taylor Swift, the anti-Trump pop mega-sensation, and Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper whose Super Bowl half-time show served a rallying cry earlier this year for anti-MAGA voices the world over, came in first and second place respectively on the Swedish streaming giant’s newly released “Most Streamed Artists of All Time” list.
In fact, nine of the artists on the top 20 list are staunch critics of Trump and his administration, including The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Eminem, Rihanna, Coldplay, and Kendrick Lamar.
The remainder are not noted for being particularly vocal on political issues, with only one, Kanye West, declaring themselves a fan of the president.
Trump has made little secret of his contempt for both Swift and Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio. His feud with Swift began in earnest in 2018, when she endorsed a Democratic candidate for Senate in her adopted home of Tennessee.
The president said he liked her music “about 25 percent less” as a result of her endorsement. She later went on to back Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Trump responded by posting “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social, only to bizarrely follow up with AI-generated images falsely suggesting she had in fact endorsed him instead.
He has since claimed Swift is “no longer hot,” contrary to her now-confirmed status as quite literally the most-streamed music artist of all time.
Trump’s treatment of Bad Bunny has followed a similar pattern. He initially claimed he’d “never heard” of the Puerto Rican musician when his Super Bowl selection was announced, only to later boycott the event and lambast Martínez Ocasio’s performance as “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER,” and “an affront to the Greatness of America.”
Trump also took issue with the Spanish-language artist’s performance because “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.”
The president’s comments suggest he was unaware that Spanish is spoken by approximately 500 million people worldwide, including 42 million Americans, whose enthusiastic streaming of the artist’s music will have helped propel him to the number two spot on Spotify’s list.
