Legendary singer Linda Ronstadt made it clear in an Instagram post that she was not pleased that former President Donald Trump was bringing his "hate show" to the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona, and made it clear she is voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz.
In her post, she also took aim at Trump's own running mate J.D. Vance and his controversial remarks about "childless cat ladies" participating in politics by sharing a photo of herself with her cat.
She wrote the following, noting that Trump's racism is unbelievably out of place in Tuscon, a city with a significant Mexican-American presence:
"Donald Trump is holding a rally on Thursday in a rented hall in my hometown, Tucson. I would prefer to ignore that sad fact. But since the building has my name on it, I need to say something. It saddens me to see the former President bring his hate show to Tucson, a town with deep Mexican-American roots and a joyful, tolerant spirit."
"I don’t just deplore his toxic politics, his hatred of women, immigrants and people of color, his criminality, dishonesty and ignorance — although there’s that. For me it comes down to this: In Nogales and across the southern border, the Trump Administration systematically ripped apart migrant families seeking asylum."
"Family separation made orphans of thousands of little children and babies, and brutalized their desperate mothers and fathers. It remains a humanitarian catastrophe that Physicians for Human Rights said met the criteria for torture. There is no forgiving or forgetting the heartbreak he caused."
"Trump first ran for President warning about rapists coming in from Mexico. I’m worried about keeping the rapist out of the White House."
After signing off, she included the following pointed postscript for Vance:
"I raised two adopted children in Tucson as a single mom. They are both grown and living in their own houses. I live with a cat."
"Am I half a childless cat lady because I’m unmarried and didn’t give birth to my kids? Call me what you want, but this cat lady will be voting proudly in November for [Harris] and [Walz]."
You can see her post and the statement below.
Many praised Ronstadt for speaking out.
Ronstadt has criticized Trump before.
In 2020, she compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, the genocidal German Nazi Party leader responsible for the Holocaust, which resulted in the systematic murder of more than 6 million Jews as well as other "undesirables" perceived as threats to his vision of a supreme Aryan nation.
At the time, she told CNN's Anderson Cooper:
"Find a common enemy for everybody to hate. I was sure that Trump was going to get elected the day he announced, and I said ‘It’s gonna be like Hitler, and the Mexicans are the new Jews.’ And sure enough that’s what he delivered."
Ronstadt remarked that Germany’s “intelligentsia” had the opportunity to stop Hitler but failed to speak out. She pointed out that "the industrial complex thought that they could control him once they got him in office, and of course he was not controllable."
Hitler ultimately tightened his grip on power by installing his own loyalists and stacking the courts to solidify his control, she observed, a criticism that has been leveled at Trump, who has appointed 245 federal judges, many of them staunch social conservatives and loyalists.
note on @mychal3ts/Threads post