The White House has issued a cutting response to Joan Baez’s new poem speculating that a “little green worm” may have eaten its way through President Donald Trump’s brain.
The singer-songwriter and civil rights campaigner, 84, published her first collection of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance, last year. Her latest work, shared via Rolling Stone, is titled: Little Green Worm: A Note to the President.
In its opening lines, Baez makes reference to Robert F Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health, who said last year that a worm ate part of his brain and then died in his head.
The “Diamonds & Rust” singer writes that as Trump is “so comfortable hiring people whose minds have been hollowed out by worms,” perhaps his own has also been affected by a “little green worm” that has “worked its way into your anterior insular cortex, the part of the brain where empathy originates.”
Baez goes on to say that the same worm may have also eaten through the parts of the brain responsible for “impulse control and regulating social behavior,” which would explain Trump’s outbursts regarding “‘s***hole countries’ or accusing all Mexican immigrants of being criminals, rapists, and drug dealers.”
Baez’s poem concludes with the worm reaching the part of Trump’s brain responsible for basic intelligence and finding “oh s***: there’s nothing there.”
In an email to The Independent responding to the poem, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung wrote: “Who is Joan Baez?”
Baez emerged as one of the leading figures of the folk music movement of the 1960s. In 1963, she sang with Bob Dylan at the March on Washington from the podium where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, and she headlined Woodstock in 1969.
Speaking to The Independent last year, Baez discussed her lifelong environmental activism and noted that witnessing the reality of climate change has left her “terrified.”
“No matter how many of us tried to make people aware, it’s caught up with us,” she said. “Mother Earth is in a rage, and you really can’t blame her. I don’t want to have my life dictated by fear, but sometimes it’s just overwhelming to wake up at night and think ‘What, if anything, is there going to be for my granddaughter?’
“Possibly nothing? We may be gone. I have a really black joke that I made up: we will be lucky if we get eliminated by climate change, because then Trump won’t have time to set up death camps. It’s pretty awful, but it’s true.”
