No president has ever been more obsessed with being liked by celebrities, especially music stars, than Donald Trump. Suffice it to say, they have not returned the favor. In the decade-plus since he first slid down his golden escalator and announced his first run for president, Trump has inspired an enormous number of protest songs. Songwriters have taken on his racism, his sexism, his hypocrisy, his corruption, his greed, his dictatorial aspirations, and more. Some of these are somber, some are screeds, some are about policy, some are just visceral statements of deep personal revulsion.
Every genre in music has been chipping in — from punk rockers to rappers to folkies and indie singer-songwriters. Some of the artists on our list of Trump protest songs have been speaking truth to power for decades; others have spent a large part of their lives inside the Trump nightmare. They all light a torch to help us find a way out.
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8. Jesse Welles, ‘No Kings’ (2025)
Jesse Welles
A Woody Guthrie for the TikTok era, Jesse Welles has garnered millions of views with his clever lefty folk tunes. Of course, Donald Trump has been a target on songs like “Trump Trailers,” which imagines the Donald trying to pull off his egomaniacal huckster shtick if he was raised in a trailer park, or “Join ICE,” a satiric ad for new recruits. “No Kings,” written to inspire demonstrators at the protest rallies of the same name, embodies the spirit of Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” imagining a better world beyond Trumpism with lines like, “No hatred, no violence/No starvation and no greed/And no kings, no kings.” —J.D.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-trump-protest-songs-1235597698/yg-fdt-2016-1235597703/
