Is it because they’re in love that Trump can’t stand them?
In September, the president famously let loose on John Legend and Chrissy Teigen in one of his bizarre drive-by tweetings, huffing and puffing about the “boring” singer and his “filthy mouthed wife.” Teigen responded with a tweet so sublime that it became canon: “lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.” The whole exchange was suitable for framing—and one of Teigen’s friends actually did frame it and present it to her as a gift.
The shadowbox with Trump’s broadside and Teigen’s burn now sits in the grand entryway to the family’s home in Beverly Hills, on a table crowded with otherwise joyful photos of the couple’s beautiful 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren and their grand wedding at Lake Como. In person, Teigen herself is unguarded and endearing. When she gives this reporter a tour of the house, she doesn’t just point out the fitness room (“Here’s the gym I never go into”), the master bathroom (“Here’s my tub where I take baths with Luna and we watch the movie Coco”), and the screening room (“Look at all my candy jars. Literally all I wanted as a 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥 was a room with this much candy”), but also the milky tablet in the ceramic bowl next to the Nintendo Switch on her nightstand: “Here’s my Lexapro.” Teigen has become a social media icon precisely because she can be frank about her struggle with anxiety and her need for approval, while also dunking on the president and MAGA nation. As she puts it, “I don’t care about pissing off a bunch of bigots.”
It’s a Sunday afternoon, three weeks to the day since the tweet battle. Three-year-old Luna is running away from her 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑦 brother, Miles, who desperately wants to hug her. She’s wearing a bright orange one-shoulder bathing suit and urging her daddy to put on the swim trunks she picked out for him, which are blue and covered with orange crabs. Legend promised her they’d go swimming in the backyard pool when she woke up from her nap.
Sunlight fills the house. There’s football on the TV, clattering in the kitchen, and the heavy breathing of the family’s bulldogs puttering around everyone’s feet. Awards line the shelves on one wall, most of them the fruits of Legend’s recent EGOT distinction. (At 40, he is one of the youngest of the 15 people to have earned the honor, as well as the first black man.) But there’s also Teigen’s Glamour Women of the Year award, the presentation of which brought Legend to tears as he described how intimidated his wife of six years used to feel in rooms of influential people. In front of all that hardware rests a little plastic trophy for Teigen’s mother, Pepper, who lives with them, for surviving the Hot Cheetos and Takis Fuego Challenge.
Legend brings a decency and gravitas to every room he enters, be it onstage at the Academy Awards or in prisons across the country in conversation with inmates as part of his criminal-justice reform activism. Teigen, 33, is the electricity, the laugh that breaks the tension. She’s a famous person who can’t bring herself to respond to texts from famous people who follow her on Twitter because, as she explains, “I’m terrified they’re going to think I’m a thirsty fame whore.”
Legend calls himself a nerd. Teigen admits she’s kind of a basket case. They adore each other.
“I’ve been nourished by watching them,” says Ava DuVernay, who directed the movie Selma, for which Legend won a best original song Oscar. “It’s just beautiful to see a real melding of their family life—their home life, those moments they curate with their 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren—side by side with real activist commentary about the way that they feel in the world.”
