Grammy-winning singer Rod Stewart says he can’t be friends with President Donald Trump anymore, citing his administration’s ongoing support for the brutal Israeli military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 55,000 Palestinians since October 2023 according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Stewart recently sat down for an interview with Radio Times to promote his upcoming set at the Glastonbury Festival, only to tear into Trump, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu — after being asked if he still considers Trump a friend.
“No, I can’t any more,” Stewart told the outlet. “As long as he’s selling arms to the Israelis — and he still is. How’s that war ever gonna stop? And we should stop selling them as well. What did Starmer say yesterday? They dropped the talks on trade?”
“What fucking difference is that gonna make?” the singer continued. “Someone’s gotta do something. What Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians is exactly what happened to the Jews. It’s annihilation, and that’s all he wants to do — get rid of them all.”
“I don’t know how they sleep at night,” Stewart added.
This isn’t the first time Stewart has criticized Trump. The rock icon reportedly said ahead of the 2016 election that he didn’t think Trump was “presidential,” called him a “prick” in 2020 for pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords and ridiculed him onstage last year.
Stewart used to frequently socialize with the former real estate tycoon, however. The rock icon explained during his interview Tuesday that he lives “literally half a mile” from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — and once “knew him very, very well.”
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“I used to go to his Christmas parties,” Stewart told Radio Times. “He’s always been a bit of a man’s man. I liked him for that. But he didn’t, as far as I’m concerned, treat women very well. But since he became president, he became another guy.”
“Somebody I didn’t know,” he reflected.
The singer mocked Trump last year during a Las Vegas concert ahead of the 2024 election for “turning orange,” as Trump made the racist claim that then-Democratic nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris, “happened to turn Black” before announcing her run.
Stewart is a model railway enthusiast at home, but also politically active in his spare time.
In 2017, he covered all necessary expenses for a group of children with disabilities — whose parents couldn’t raise enough money to travel to Washington, D.C. — to protest a GOP health care bill that included proposed cuts to Medicaid.
“I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but I am a father,” he said at the time.
