Rihanna has never needed a microphone to make headlines. Sometimes all it takes is an Instagram comment section and a critic who forgot exactly who they were talking to.
The Bajan billionaire jumped into a heated online debate over Donald Trump’s second term after Joy Reid’s latest take started making the rounds. Her first comment was blunt enough to get people talking, but it was what came next that set the internet on fire.
One commenter decided Rihanna had no business weighing in on American politics at all and told her to mind her own country. That person picked the wrong superstar on the wrong day.
Rihanna didn’t just defend her right to speak. She turned the insult right back around, and the name she dropped in the process had the whole thread taking notes.
It all started with a clip from Charles M. Blow’s “Forward” podcast, where Reid didn’t hold back about where the country stands under Trump. “I think America has gotten its just desserts,” Reid said, according to REVOLT.
She went on to argue that “a majority of white America” wanted “an unfiltered Trump presidency,” and they got it.
After Hollywood Unlocked shared the clip on Instagram, one user summed up the mood in the comments, writing, “Those who voted for him did this. It’s disgusting.” Rihanna, who has three children with A$AP Rocky, slid in with a reply that widened the blame. “And believe it or not, those who didn’t vote at all, also did this!”
She has a point. Roughly 89 million eligible Americans sat out the 2024 election that sent Trump back to the White House over Kamala Harris, according to IBTimes UK. But there was one detail critics could not let go. Rihanna was born in Barbados, she is not a U.S. citizen, and she has never been able to cast a ballot here herself.
One commenter thought that was the knockout punch. “Maybe in Barbados but here in the states the electoral congress elects the president… focus on ya country sis,” the user wrote, apparently mixing up Congress with the Electoral College in the process.
Rihanna wasted no time. “Only if you would focus more on yours!” she fired back, before going straight for the jugular. “We would gladly lend y’all @mamottley for even just A WEEK!!!” according to Hollywood Unlocked.
That tag belongs to Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, the same leader who stood beside Rihanna when the island named her a National Hero in 2021. In other words, Barbados has a woman running things, and Rihanna was more than happy to loan her out to a country that has never elected one.
She wasn’t finished, either. “Still gotta focus on the country I’m raising my kids in, nutty,” she added. Her sons, RZA and Riot, and daughter, Rocki, are all being raised in the U.S., and her reply pulled in more than four times the likes of the comment she was answering.
Over on X, where news of her non-voter comment spread quickly, plenty of people were firmly on RiRi’s side. “She didn’t lie at all,” one user wrote.
Another asked, “Why are you not voting then being mad when we get a ‘bad’ president?” A third simply added, “Always on the right side of history!”
This also isn’t the first time Rihanna has told critics exactly where they can file their opinions. Days before the 2024 election, she posted a video joking about sneaking into the polls with her son’s passport under the hashtag #VoteCauseICant. When one critic told her to stick to music, she asked where they were on Jan. 6.
Her feud with Trump goes back even further. In 2020, she posed beside graffiti cursing his name, and when Joe Biden was sworn in, she shared a photo of herself symbolically “taking out the trash.” Trump returned fire in 2023, calling her Super Bowl halftime show an “epic fail” and the worst in history on Truth Social.
As for anyone questioning where her heart is, she answered that this summer when she brought her kids to Barbados to see the street now named after her. She can love her island and still speak up for the country her children call home.
And if the comment sections keep coming for her, she clearly has plenty more where that came from.
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