Madonna has delivered a scorching takedown of Donald Trump for failing to acknowledge World AIDS Day.
According to reports, the U.S. State Department instructed staff and grant recipients not to use federal funds for any World AIDS Day activities. The New York Times notes that officials pointed to a new policy directing agencies to “refrain from messaging on any commemorative days” altogether.
The move effectively ends a long-standing federal tradition: for decades, the U.S. government publicly honoured those lost to AIDS and used 1 December to spotlight ongoing efforts to fight the epidemic.
In an impassioned Instagram post, Madonna said the Trump administration’s lack of recognition for World AIDS Day is ‘ridiculous, absurd and unthinkable’.
“For four decades, this day has been internationally recognized around the world by people from all walks of life, because millions of people’s lives have been touched by the HIV crisis,” she wrote.
“People have lost lovers and husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends and mothers and daughters and children to this deadly disease, of which there is still no cure.
“Donald Trump has announced that World AIDS Day should no longer be acknowledged. It’s one thing to order federal agents to refrain from commemorating this day, but to ask the general public to pretend it never happened is ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s unthinkable.”
Madonna was among the first mainstream artists to use her platform to advocate for education, safe-sex awareness, and compassion at a time when the crisis was widely ignored.
She has lost many friends to the disease, including her former roommate and tour manager Martin Burgoyne, ballet teacher and mentor Christopher Flynn and artist Keith Haring.
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“I bet [Trump has] never watched his best friend die of AIDS, held their hand, and watched the blood drain from their face as they took their last breath at the age of 23,” Madonna continued.
“The list of people that I have known and loved and lost to AIDS is pretty long. I’m sure many of you out there can relate. Let me say it one more time – there still isn’t a cure for AIDS, and people still die from it. I refuse to acknowledge that these people have died in vain.”
Madonna concluded her post by affirming that she will “continue to honor World AIDS Day” and urged her followers to do the same.
The Queen of Pop reflected on her history with the AIDS epidemic in 2019, telling NME that she was “getting involved with a lot of groups and speaking up and I was enraged by how I saw people being treated”.
“I came to the LGBTQ community and put my arms around them. While everyone else was running away from them, I was running towards them,” she said.
“It was so crazy. For months I was going around saying I wasn’t HIV positive but then I thought, What if I was? Does that make me a bad person? And are you going to treat me differently? It was a crazy time and it really hurt me a lot. That’s just one circumstance where people – ‘scuse me for swearing – really tried to fuck with me.”
As well as her longtime HIV/AIDS advocacy, Madonna has been a vocal critic of Trump and his administration.
Following his 2024 win in the election, she wrote on social media: “Trying to get my head around why a convicted felon, rapist, bigot was chosen to lead our country because he’s good for the economy?”
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