The White House called The Chicks singer Natalie Maines a “despicable nobody” with a “peanut-sized brain.”
The insult came after she took aim at President Donald Trump from the stage of New York City’s Beacon Theater on Monday, Oct. 12, 2026.
The full line came Wednesday, Oct. 14, from a White House spokesperson who was not named in the statement to Fox News Digital: “Natalie Maines is a despicable nobody who clearly suffers from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted her peanut-sized brain.”
A Big Wet Kiss for Bush
Maines, who turned 52 on Oct. 14, was onstage with bandmates Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire for the first of two Manhattan dates on The Chicks’ “Taking the Long Way 20th Anniversary Tour.” Before she spoke, the band screened a vintage montage of TV pundits and ordinary people in an uproar over the notion that someone might not like a sitting president. Then Maines told the room she would “never” give in to the “shut up and sing” crowd.
Looking back at 2003, she said the group once believed the backlash was as bad as things could possibly get. “Now I’d give George (W.) Bush a big wet kiss,” she told the crowd, “‘Cause now we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from the United States.”
Later in the show, Maines gave a shout-out to the Obama Presidential Center, which the band visited in Chicago earlier this month, praising “all the positive things they did and continue to do,” and then drew a line between that era and this one. “So different than the deranged nut job we have right now,” she said.
Country Radio Dropped Them in 2003
The Beacon remarks were a deliberate callback. On March 10, 2003, as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq, Maines told a London audience the band was ashamed that the president of the United States came from Texas. Country radio pulled their singles, conservative commentators branded them unpatriotic, fellow country artists told them to be quiet, and fans organized boycotts and protests. The death threats grew serious enough that the FBI stepped in, and the trio was blacklisted from hundreds of country stations.
The album they made next turned the mess into a trophy case. “Taking the Long Way,” released in 2006 and produced by Rick Rubin, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and Top Country Albums and later took home both best country album and the top prize, album of the year, at the 2007 Grammys. Its lead single, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” took three Grammys, including song and record of the year, and reached No. 4 on the Hot 100. The controversy also produced the song “Easy Silence” and the documentary “Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing.”
Nashville never fully welcomed them back. “Not Ready to Make Nice” stalled at No. 36 on Hot Country Songs, a steep drop for a group that had scored six No. 1s and 15 top 10s on that chart before 2003. The band has not climbed higher than No. 20 there since, with “Gaslighter” in 2020. The Chicks, formerly The Dixie Chicks, have won 13 Grammy Awards since Maines, a Texas native, joined in 1995.
A Familiar Line From the White House
Maines has not softened in the years between. On the DCX World Tour MMXVI in 2016, the band performed “Goodbye Earl” in front of a backdrop that showed Trump defaced as the devil. In May, she posted a profanity-filled Instagram message blasting Trump’s $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded plan to pay allies who were investigated during the Biden years, writing that democracy was vanishing in plain sight and claiming the president was named a million times in the Epstein files.
The White House answered that post with the same “peanut-sized brain” statement it issued this week.
Fans split over the Beacon set, with one grumbling online about paying $1,500 for a ticket and getting politics along with the music, while others applauded her for saying it. The tour plays the 2006 album start to finish before a “best of” encore, and it runs through early November with stops still ahead in Nashville, Austin and Los Angeles.