Rumors have been swirling for the last several days that Beyoncé will stop by the Democratic National Convention — but no one seems to know if it will actually happen.
Hours before Vice President Kamala Harris is set to accept the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday night, Rolling Stone has learned that Democratic party organizers and Chicago government officials have been preparing for the possibility of Beyoncé’s arrival.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, government officials, including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office, local law enforcement personnel, and DNC organizers have been rushing to prepare for potential Beyoncé-related chaos in the Windy City — even if she does not end up showing up.
“It’s been crazy,” says one person familiar with the matter. “People running the show and working here obviously will prepare for Beyoncépalooza… We just keep being told ‘I don’t know’ when this comes up,” adds the source. “It has come up frequently.”
Two on-the-ground sources at the DNC say they heard a marching band sound-checking Beyoncé’s song ”Cuff It” on Thursday, although there were no official sightings of the singer.
If Beyoncé does show up, city officials have war-gamed possible scenarios and preemptively allocated resources to accommodate such an event, the sources add.
One potential scenario that has been actively discussed is the possibility of Beyoncé arriving at the Soldier Field stadium to perform and endorse the Harris-Walz ticket. The Chicago Bears stadium, which saw Beyoncé for her Renaissance tour last July, is set to host a watch party for the overflow crowd who want to watch Harris receive the nomination, but could not get into the convention perimeter.
A separate source close to the campaign tells Rolling Stone that if Beyoncé does arrive at the DNC, they “couldn’t imagine” the singer not appearing onstage with Harris in the arena where the convention is being held.
Chicago officials and Team Kamala organizers have discussed making law enforcement and logistical considerations for Beyoncé’s appearance for days but were hamstrung by the fact that the singer’s team and senior ranks of the Harris campaign would not, or could not, confirm if she is coming.
The Harris-Walz ticket has been using Beyoncé’s Lemonade song “Freedom” on the campaign trail, and in a campaign ad that dropped at night one of the DNC this week. “The Moon? Landed on it. The future? Building it. Freedom? Nobody loves it more,” declares actor Jeffrey Wright in the ad, soundtracked by Queen Bey’s track.
Beyoncé’s team reportedly permitted Harris to use “Freedom” during her campaign just a few hours before her campaign launch event in July. In the aftermath, “Freedom” saw a big uptick in streams, jumping 1,300 percent according to data from Luminate.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z are longtime Democrats. Beyoncé endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket a day before the election in 2020, spoke publicly at a Hillary Clinton rally ahead of the 2016 election, and raised funds for and penned a letter to President Barack Obama amid his re-election campaign in 2012.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.