“America is so divided. Trump is clearly unhinged.” Punk priestess Patti Smith still fears for all our futures

Patti Smith, 2024 — (Image credit: Jim Dyson/Getty Images)

Patti Smith was one of the essential, formative voices on New York's nascent punk rock scene in the mid 1970s, and, at 77, she retains a healthy distrust of authority. In a new [paywalled] interview with The Times, she calls Donald Trump “clearly unhinged”, and backs his Democratic Party opponent Kamala Harris in her bid to become the first female president of the United States, with certain caveats.

“America is so divided,” she tells writer Kate Mossman. “She has to walk two paths at the same time and the agenda is not to address global issues. I might have been more angry about that, except with an opponent like Trump, who’s clearly unhinged. I have to step away and do my part, which is to vote.”

A long-time Democrat, Smith cites former US President Jimmy Carter as one of her heroes, and tells Mossman that Carter, America's 39th president, who held office from January 1977 to January 1981, was talking about key issues in today's world - climate change, Palestine - decades before they were concerns for other US politicians.

“Jimmy Carter is almost 99 years old and he’s in a hospice,” she says. “They keep thinking he’s going to die any day - he’ll be 100 in October - and he said he just wants to live to November: to live long enough to vote for Kamala.”

For Smith, addressing climate change should be any politician's number one priority, particularly as she feels that the global pandemic pushed the issue backwards.

“I felt our young people were making strides, millions of kids on the streets,” she tells Mossman. “But I always pin my faith on the young.”

Read the full interview with Patti Smith here.

Last year, Garbage vocalist Shirley Manson hailed Smith as “a beacon in the darkness”, stating that the punk priestess remains “inspirational and brave and hard as nails and soft as a kitten’s belly.”

“I’m in awe and I’m in her thrall,” Manson added.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.