Billy Joel decided to finally break his silence on Donald Trump when he heard the president call neo-Nazis “fine people,” he revealed in the new HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes.
Joel says in the doc’s second installment, airing Friday night on HBO, that he was “angry” to hear the president’s response to 2017’s white supremacist Unite the Right rally, where one person died and several were injured.
“Here they are marching through an American city saying, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ We fought a war to defeat these people!” adds Joel, who is Jewish. “And when Trump comes out and says, ‘There were very fine people on both sides…He should’ve come out and said, ‘Those are bad people.’ There is no qualifying it. The Nazis are not good people. Period.”
The Grammy-winning musician was so angered by the comments that he took his first ever political stance onstage—by simply wearing a Star of David on his coat as he performed at his Madison Square Garden concert weeks later.
“I had to do something, but I didn’t want to get up on a soap box on stage and say, ‘This is wrong,’” he explains of the choice in the film. “So I wore the star. But basically to say, no matter what, I will always be a Jew.” Trump attempted to walk back his 2017 comments the following year, but it did little to soften Joel’s opinion on him.
The five-time Grammy winner told Rolling Stone in 2019 that Trump’s “fine people” comments were “bulls–t,” as he recalled being “p—ed off” at the time. “There’s no fine Nazis. My father’s generation fought a war to put an end to Nazism,” he said, “so this president missed the boat. He had a great chance to say something meaningful and he blew it.” He also explained at the time why he’s “not a big fan” of Trump’s.
“His father was rich and gave him a lot of money. I don’t know how much empathy he actually has for people who don’t live that kind of life.” That said, he insisted that getting “politically involved” was not his lane. “I find a lot of people resent celebrities touting their candidate. That can actually turn more people off than it can bring more people in.”
Joel expresses similar thoughts in And So It Goes. “I’ve never liked getting political onstage,” he says, “People want to get away from a lot of that stuff, I realized that.” But the Nazi comments were more than he could take, he explains, since “sometimes there are things that happen and you can’t just look away.”
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