The White House has gone after Natalie Maines again. In a statement given to Fox News Digital on Wednesday, it called The Chicks frontwoman “a despicable nobody who clearly suffers from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted her peanut-sized brain.”
If that wording sounds familiar, it should. According to Fox News, it is the same statement the White House gave in May, after Maines attacked President Trump on Instagram. The fresh trigger this time is what she has been saying from the stage on The Chicks’ 20th anniversary tour for Taking the Long Way, the 2006 album that answered the backlash she set off in 2003.
What she said on stage
The comments the White House is responding to were first reported by Billboard, which ran them under the headline “The Chicks Compare George W. Bush to ‘Deranged Nut Job’ Trump.” According to Billboard, as quoted by Fox News, Maines told the crowd she would now give George W. Bush “a big wet kiss,” and that she would “never” give in to the people who told the band to shut up and sing.
The line isn’t new to this tour. At the first of two Chicago nights earlier this month, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Maines looked back on the 2003 fallout with “Little did we know it could get so much worse,” before updating her most famous remark: “and now we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from the United States.”
In Boston on October 9, Boston.com’s review described the band returning to the London story as part of the show. Maines answered a woman’s old demand that they shut up and sing with a simple “No, thank you.”
There’s one discrepancy in the coverage. Fox News says Maines “kicked off” the tour in Manhattan this week. The tour actually opened on September 30 at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, according to the dates JamBase published when it was announced in May. The New York shows were at the Beacon Theatre on October 12 and 13. The remarks Billboard reported appear to come from those Manhattan nights, but the Bush-to-Trump comparison has clearly been part of the show for at least two weeks.
Twenty-three years of this
The fight is so charged because of where it started. On March 10, 2003, nine days before the invasion of Iraq, Maines told a crowd at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire that the band didn’t want the war and was “ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”
What followed is one of the most severe backlashes any act in American popular music has faced. Thousands of country radio stations stopped playing the band. CDs were destroyed in public, and the group received death threats. Maines apologized that year, then took the apology back in 2006. That same year Taking the Long Way arrived, led by “Not Ready to Make Nice,” which won Song of the Year at the 2007 Grammys. The band dropped “Dixie” from its name in 2020 and has never really gone back to country radio.
That history is why the current tour carries more weight than a standard anniversary run. Reviews from Chicago and Boston describe a show that tells the 2003 story directly and ends up somewhere more pointed than nostalgia.
The May fight, and the rerun
The first round of this exchange came in May 2026. As Fox News reported at the time, Maines posted a profanity-laced attack on Trump to Instagram, writing that “our democracy is disappearing right before our eyes” and saying an earlier post had been taken down. Happy Mag linked her anger to the administration’s $1.8 billion fund for people who say past administrations investigated them unfairly, and named White House spokesperson Davis Ingle as the source of the “despicable nobody” statement.
On Wednesday, the White House sent the same words back out. Fox attributed the statement to “the White House” without naming a spokesperson, and reported that a representative for Maines had not immediately responded.
Reusing the insult works both ways. It shows the administration still thinks Maines is worth answering, and that it apparently had no new reply to her latest remarks. Her supporters will see it as proof she is still getting under the right skin, more than two decades after London. Her critics will say a singer who built her career in country music has spent twenty years insulting a large share of its audience, and that the White House is only saying what those listeners think.
What happens next
The tour isn’t over, and the next stop is a pointed one. According to JamBase’s list of dates, The Chicks play Nashville on October 15, followed by two nights in San Antonio at the Majestic Theatre on October 17 and 18. Austin comes on October 20, closer to home for a band that started out in Texas. Dates in Seattle and San Francisco follow before two final nights at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on November 1 and 2.
Nobody expects Maines to drop the material from the set because of a White House statement. Her whole career since 2003 has been built on refusing to. More likely, the line will get louder.
