Barbra Streisand, America’s funny girl, parent of dog clones, chronicler of broken hearts (and memories!), has turned her most venerable craft to her least favorite American president: Donald Trump. Yes, it’s time for the reemergence of Barbra Streisand, political activist. Streisand is a longtime Democratic supporter who appeared on a 1971 list of Richard Nixon’s political enemies, and after today’s release of her new single, “Don’t Lie to Me”—a song she says is inspired by the current occupant of the Oval Office and his infamous tendency to play fast and loose with the truth—she has officially taken her place as perhaps the most melodious member of the resistance.
Streisand knew when she started making her new album, Walls—her first collection of primarily new material in several years—that its theme would be social justice. And for the record, she won’t mind if Trump takes it personally. An outspoken supporter of Hillary Clinton, Streisand attended the Women’s March in 2017 and frequently challenges the president’s policies in the media. In 2017 she wrote an essay for the Huffington Post titled “Clueless, Reckless, Graceless, Mindless, and Heartless: Our President-Elect,” in which she called him “dangerous” and “unfit for office.” But when it came time to write “Don’t Lie to Me” (lyrics include: “Why can’t you just tell me the truth?” and “How can you win if we all lose?”), she says she “tried to make it more subtle.” She concedes that “it could be about a relationship . . . but yes, it is about Donald Trump.” She has been open with her outrage about the crises at the border and the inherently hypocritical rise of American isolationism. “Unless you’re an American Indian, you know, you’re a child or grandchild or great-grandchild of immigrants, even the president,” she says during our phone conversation. It’s safe to say that borders and walls were on her mind during the making of Walls.
She also has a lot of thoughts about Trump, the man: from that blond, combed-over coif (“It’s not classy; it’s not dignified”) to the “lack of dignity, the lack of humility, the lack of manners. I mean, and on top of that, the lies to people without any guilt.” She scoffs. “Obviously he’s not Jewish.” Though both lifelong New Yorkers who have spent a significant stretch in the public eye, Streisand doesn’t think she has ever met Trump in person, though she says that recently she was looking through audience footage from one of her concerts in the early ’90s, and there he was in the crowd, “sitting in the audience next to Barbara Walters.” He didn’t come backstage.
Streisand and I are speaking on the eve of the hearing at which both Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, and Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexual assault, will testify—a situation the president would go on to call “a big, fat con job” later in the evening. “Trump wants to go back in time,” Streisand bemoans, “not forward. A lot of Republicans always seem to want to take away Roe v. Wade—make women go backward in time and not have control of their bodies. The government should control your body—I mean, is that what they’re saying? After all this time, that’s 45 years?” She remembers “joy” when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, a year after making Up the Sandbox, a film in which Streisand plays a housewife who becomes pregnant and considers abortion. (“It was a total flop. It dealt with that issue, which nobody really wanted to look at.”)
The 11 new songs on Walls include the pointedly patriotic Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner’s “Take Care of This House” from the 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (lyrics: “Care for this house/Shine it by hand/And keep it so clean/The glow can be seen all over the land”), as well as some less openly partisan numbers, including covers of “Imagine,” “What a Wonderful World,” and “What The World Needs Now.” The last song on the album, a new version of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the strident, literal showstopper that Streisand most recently lent to a soaring episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, looks to the future. But the question remains: How will the public react to a Barbra Streisand protest album? “I don’t know how people are going to take it,” Streisand says. “It just came from my gut. It came from my brain. It came from my heart, my soul. It came from my anger, and it came from my sadness.” And it’s here just in time for the midterm elections—knowing Streisand, somehow we don’t think that’s by accident.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Vogue