Lana Del Rey has taken to Twitter to clarify comments about Donald Trump, made during a recent interview with the BBC. While promoting her latest single “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” yesterday (January 11), the musician discussed the outgoing president with Radio 1’s Annie Mac, suggesting that he wasn’t aware of his inflammatory role in the storming of the US Capitol last week. 

“You know, he doesn’t know that he’s inciting a riot and I believe that,” she says in the interview, adding: “He’s got delusions of grandeur.”

Prior to the breach of the Capitol, Donald Trump had repeated misleading claims of election fraud, telling supporters outside the White House: “We will never give up, we will never concede.” Even after the violent rebellion, he called those involved “great patriots” and told them, “We love you, you’re very special”.

Addressing backlash to her comments on Twitter, Del Rey said: “What I was describing w the BBC was that Trump is so significantly impaired that he may not know what he was doing due to his significant lack of empathy and the wider ranging problem is the issue of sociopathy and narcissism in America.”

“I don’t appreciate the larger magazines taking my well-intentioned and believe it or not liberal comments out of context,” she added. “It’s actually what I sing about quite often. It’s what I’ve been condemned for saying. You can listen to the entire interview.”

“I really don’t appreciate being painted as some white Republican,” she continued in a five-minute video subsequently posted to Instagram.

Del Rey’s comments about Trump aren’t the only controversy to come in the middle of her Chemtrails Over the Country Club album rollout, either. Earlier this week, she shared the cover art and tracklist for the record, alongside a bizarre Instagram caption that addressed the artwork’s apparent lack of diversity.

“I also want to say that with everything going on this year,” the caption read, “And no this was not intended – these are my best friends, since you are asking today. And damn! As it happens when it comes to my amazing friends and this cover yes there are people of color on this record’s picture and that’s all I’ll say about that but thank you.”

Subsequent criticisms have called her out for naming dropping people of colour (AKA playing the “I have a Black friend” card) and for her conflation of rappers with people of colour when she writes: “In 11 years working I have always been extremely inclusive without even trying to. My best friends are rappers my boyfriends have been rappers.”

Chemtrails Over the Country Club is the follow-up to 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!. In the interim, Del Rey has also released a Jack Antonoff-produced poetry album, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass (which didn’t come without its own controversy) and has been working on an album of “American standards and classics”.

The first track from Chemtrails Over the Country Club arrived in October 2020, titled “Let Me Love You Like a Woman”.