President Trump on Monday sharply criticized this year’s Grammys telecast and threatened to sue its host, the comedian Trevor Noah, over a joke that appeared to tie Mr. Trump to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“The Grammy Awards are the WORST, virtually unwatchable!” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social just after 1 a.m. Eastern, after the broadcast ended.
The awards program, which ran for more than three hours, included several swipes by some of music’s biggest stars at the federal government’s militarized crackdown on undocumented immigrants. It aired on CBS for the final time on Sunday after a decades-long run — a change that the president noted in his post by saying that the network was “lucky not to have this garbage litter their airwaves any longer.”
Mr. Trump addressed Mr. Noah in even sharper personal terms over a quip that the former host of “The Daily Show” made toward the end of the ceremony after Billie Eilish won a Grammy for song of the year.
Mr. Noah said: “That is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland, which makes sense because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton.”
Mr. Epstein kept a home on a private Caribbean island where his accusers have said that he trafficked underage girls for sex.
The Justice Department has released millions of files as part of a yearslong investigation into Mr. Epstein, who died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019. Although they contain numerous references to Mr. Trump, who was a close friend of Mr. Epstein’s until the early 2000s, the president has denied any wrongdoing in connection with Mr. Epstein.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Clinton has appeared in the Epstein files. Mr. Clinton has denied having a close relationship with Mr. Epstein, and his office has said that Mr. Clinton “knows nothing about the terrible crimes” Mr. Epstein has been accused of committing.
In his Truth Social post, Mr. Trump said he had “never been to Epstein Island, nor anywhere close, and until tonight’s false and defamatory statement, have never been accused of being there, not even by the Fake News Media.”
“Noah, a total loser, better get his facts straight, and get them straight fast. It looks like I’ll be sending my lawyers to sue this poor, pathetic, talentless, dope of an M.C., and suing him for plenty$,” Mr. Trump continued.
Representatives for the Grammys and Mr. Noah did not immediately respond to requests for comment early Monday.
Matt Stevens is a Times reporter who writes about arts and culture from Los Angeles.
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