The country music genre lost one of its biggest and most definitive names on Feb. 5, 2024 when Toby Keith passed away at the age of 62, following a two-year battle with stomach cancer. His passing sent shockwaves and endless grief throughout the country community and among his millions of fans, much as you would expect for someone who was on the music scene for exactly half of his life, having been active since 1993.
And yet Keith was often a controversial figure too. The archetypal uber-patriotic country singer, known for his countless songs that heaped praise on the United States and its military, was often lumped in during recent times with the rise of the alt-right. Performing at former President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January 2017 only cemented the public image of Keith as someone who supported Trump’s political views. The truth, though, is actually considerably more nuanced.
Was Toby Keith a Trump supporter?
In short, no, Toby Keith was not what you might call a card-carrying Donald Trump supporter. The fact is that Keith was open about never having been a registered Republican, and was actually once upon a time a registered Democrat.
Back in 2004, Keith described himself as “a conservative Democrat who is sometimes embarrassed for his party.” In 2016, Keith confirmed that he had stopped considering himself a Democrat in 2008 when he re-registered as an independent, but not a Republican. As he explained to Chicago Tribune:
“I was a Democrat my whole life. They kind of disowned me when I started supporting the troops, then I went and registered independent. I’ve never been a registered Republican. It just keeps people off balance. They don’t know what to think.”
As for his voting history, Keith has admitted that he voted for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush twice. He did not declare whether he voted for Barack Obama, but he did once describe him as “doing fine” in 2009. Keith’s strongest political stance was certainly his support for the military, something which he sourced back to his veteran father. “My father was a soldier. He taught his kids to respect veterans”, Keith stated during a trip to the Middle East in 2009 to perform for U.S. troops. “It’s that respect and the thank-you that we have a military that’s in place and ready to defend our nation; our freedom.”
So why did Keith perform at Trump’s inauguration, when so many other top performers — including Elton John, Celine Dion, and KISS — reportedly refused? According to Keith, it was respect for the office of POTUS that led him to accept, rather than any kind of strong allegiance with Trump’s policies. As he colorfully put it to The Atlantic, “[If] the president of the frickin’ United States asks you to do something and you can go, you should go instead of being a jack-off.”
Nevertheless, Trump, his family, and his administration clearly continued to view Keith as a coveted celebrity ally. In January 2021, Trump even awarded him a National Medal of Arts. Meanwhile, upon his passing, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a photo of himself with Keith along with the message, “Ugh. We lost a legend this week. R.I.P Toby Keith.”
However, the Donalds may not have been paying attention to Keith’s comments in the run-up to the 2016 election, in which he made abundantly obvious that he didn’t care for either Trump or Hillary Clinton: “I can’t believe there’s 300 million Americans in this country and we’ve got these two as our final two. It’s absolutely crazy.”
From (kind of) helping discover Taylor Swift to being less of a MAGA man than expected, the real Toby Keith was clearly more multi-faceted than the person many assumed him to be.
