John Jefferson
Left: Jack White in New York City on August 20, 2024. (RW/MediaPunch/IPX via AP). Right: Donald Trump departing a campaign event in Wisconsin on Sept. 7, 2024 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
The legal troubles for Donald Trump continue to dissipate following his decisive victory in the 2024 presidential election. On the heels of special counsel Jack Smith calling it quits on his investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, another Jack has also thrown in the towel against the president-elect: White Stripes rocker Jack White, who along with bandmate Meg White, dropped a lawsuit against Trump and his campaign for using their song “Seven Nation Army” in a campaign video.
Court documents filed Sunday evening in Manhattan federal court state that the White Stripes “dismiss without prejudice all claims against Defendants Donald John Trump, Donald J. Trump for President 2024, Inc., and Margo McAtee Martin.” Martin is Trump’s deputy communications director.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in October, claimed that playing the band’s 2003 hit — referred to in the complaint as being “among the most well-known and influential musical works of all time” — in the background of a video of the former president getting on a plane to campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin without White’s “knowledge or consent” amounted to a copyright violation.
The case, similar to one Trump faces against the estate of Isaac Hayes and resembling the objections of other artists, said Trump’s “self-professed” sophistication, business acumen, entertainment experience, and history of “being on the receiving end of numerous copyright claims by musical artists whose work he used without permission” all support the assertion that he and the other defendants “knew or should have known that the use of the 7NA Works in the Infringing Trump Videos was unauthorized.”
White said that his stance on Trump has remained unchanged since 2016, when the White Stripes said “in no uncertain terms that they were ‘disgusted by [the] association”” of the band’s music with a “pro-Trump campaign video.” This time, though, the use of “Seven Nation Army” was allegedly “even more offensive” to the bandmates, who “vehemently oppose the policies adopted and actions taken by Defendant Trump when he was President and those he has proposed for the second term he seeks.”
Claiming that the Trump and the campaign “chose to ignore” White’s complaints prior to his filing of the suit, the White Stripes argued they were left “with no choice but to seek judicial recourse in order to hold Defendants accountable” after their “legal rights” were “indiscriminately trampled” upon.
Despite dropping the lawsuit against Trump, Jack White spoke out last week following Trump’s election win, lambasting the former “Apprentice” star and those who voted him back into office.
“Trump won the popular vote. End of story. Americans chose a known, obvious fascist and now America will get whatever this wannabe dictator wants to enact from here on in,” White wrote in an Instagram post on Nov. 6. “It’s absolutely dumbfounding that this con man succeeded in pulling the wool over so many Americans eyes not once, but twice.”
Matt Naham contributed to this report.
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