Is Jack White washed up?

Once, it might have seemed strange for American politicians to use a rock star as a proxy means of sniping at one another, but these are not normal times. Gavin Newsom used the White Stripes’ song “Seven Nation Army” on Instagram to soundtrack various campaign posts, and the band’s songwriter Jack White commented that “Fans of this song and also democracy, notice that I’m ok with this track being used in this manner. Not so much when Trump and his gestapo try to use one of my songs. Keep hitting him back Gavin!” For good measure, he also attacked Trump’s redesign of the Oval Office, calling it “disgusting… a vulgar, gold leafed and gaudy, professional wrestler’s dressing room.”

This went down badly with the President, who hit back via his communications director Steven Cheung. White, we learned, is a “washed-up, has-been loser” who has spent far too long “masquerading as a real artist.” The musician was stung by the criticism and responded on Instagram: “How petty and pathetic and thin skinned could this administration get? ‘Masquerading as a real artist’? Thank you for giving me my tombstone engraving! Well here’s my opinion, trump is masquerading as a human being.”

On and on the excoriation went. White eventually concluded – after describing the President as “that orange grifter,” “a low life fascist” and a conman – that “no I’m not a Democrat either, I’m a human being raised in Detroit, I’m an artist who’s owned his own businesses like his own upholstery shop and recording label since he was 21 years old who has enough street sense to know when a 3 card monte dealer is a cheap grifter and a thief.” Clearly, the criticism had stung, hence the baroque invective of the response. But did Cheung have a point?

White – let us be frank – owes his considerable fame and fortune to his work with the White Stripes. It now seems bizarre, but the band’s most famous and successful album in the United States was not Elephant, which contains their best-known and most iconic song, “Seven Nation Army,” but their final, 2007 release Icky Thump, which sold a huge number of copies to a thrilled public. Had the White Stripes continued, fame and fortune were assured, but White abruptly diverted his energies into solo projects instead, announcing in 2011 that his act had ceased “mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band.” (Romantic strife between him and the drummer, Meg, his ex-wife, probably didn’t help.) They reunite this year to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; we shall see if the inevitable performance is the precursor to anything more lasting.

He certainly hasn’t been resting on his laurels since 2007. White has released six solo albums under his own name, two albums with the Raconteurs, and three LPs with the Dead Weather. Most of them have been successful – both his 2022 albums, Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, entered the Billboard Top 10 – and critical acclaim comes as easily to White, one of the most prolific and admired American songwriters of the past quarter-century, as it did to his idols Loretta Lynn and Muddy Waters. It was not for nothing that the awestruck New York Times said of White in 2012 that he was “the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time.”

Has the blossom fallen from the bud since then? In all honesty, not in any way that should make any significant difference to public appreciation of the now-50-year-old musician. Inevitably, he will forever be remembered as the composer of “Seven Nation Army”; nothing that he has done since is as iconic as that. Yet perhaps now he has found a new, exciting public role, as botherer-in-chief to the Trump administration. The mantle previously was held by the actor Robert De Niro, whose usual public inarticulacy slipped from him when he was lambasting the President, but perhaps someone else should pursue such a course. If it is to be White – in his own words, less a Democrat and more an outraged independent businessman – then the next few years could be incendiary indeed.