"Daddy's Home" - There Is Nothing R&B About Donald Trump
MAGA's Latest, and Most Nauseating, Sycophancy
As with all news in our modern dystopia, we still reflectively double-check to see if The Onion posted whatever outlandish horse shit just made our jaw drop. We can’t help it.
Alas, satire is dead.
In the latest sycophantic stunt to exploit the palace of power through the revolving door that is Donald J. Trump’s fragile ego, the White House made a Vaseline-lens “music video” of our Dear Leader returning from the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague.
Without the music, the montage is an eye-roll-and-move-on interruption of your doom-scrolling. But, sound up, it is set to Usher’s “Hey Daddy”. The involuntary dry heave is psychosomatic.
The footage is edited together with a manufactured fondness and intimacy, almost nostalgia. But even MAGAholics are not romantically intimate with Trump so why would they miss him like a lover? Besides, how can you miss a stranger in a globalized world where everything is live-streamed. And did anyone read the lyrics before they posted it on the official White House website and social media? No. They took two syllables out of context and couldn’t glamorize it fast enough. For a party that’s all too eager to federalize abstinence-only “sex education” the U.S. government is trying awfully hard to act like 1990s MTV.
When a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a king. The palace becomes a circus. — Elizabeth Bangs, (not an old Turkish proverb)
Meanwhile, Usher is performing at wherever the tax-evading Bezos wedding got chased off to after Venetians protested en masse.¹ Here’s hoping the R&B royalty isn’t following Snoop Dogg to MAGAmerica.
After the video was released, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte quickly and publicly clarified that his statement “Sometimes Daddy has to use strong language,” was a reference to the U.S. government, writ large, not Trump specifically.²
English language nuance notwithstanding, Secretary General Rutte did the world no favors when, almost elbowing Trump in the ribs, he laughed about that one-word disciplinary paternalism to the most insecure power-hungry figurehead.
Predictably, the “Trump War Room” is already selling $35 “limited edition” red t-shirts that say “Daddy” under a Che chic monotone of Trump’s mugshot from his 2023 arrest for election fraud.³ Why not charge $47 like the Trump family phone plan?
The cult of celebrity abounds.
It seems the politicians who try the hardest to ingratiate themselves with the most popular musicians diverge the most on their actual politics and beliefs.
During his 1984 re-election campaign against Walter Mondale, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan famously implied that he and Bruce Springsteen shared a vision for America.
Bruce Springsteen’s vision was more than mere flag worship. It was the wellbeing of Americans themselves.
“There’s something really dangerous happening to us out there now. We’re slowly getting split up into two different Americas. Things are being taken away from the people that need them and given to the people that don’t. There’s a promise getting broken. In the beginning the idea was we all live here a little bit like a family where the strong can help the weak ones, the rich can help the poor ones. You know, the American dream,” Springsteen said at one of his sold-out concerts at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena three days after Reagan’s remarks.⁴
“Now” hasn’t changed in four heartbreaking decades. The American Dream is still being deliberately withheld by the elite from the hardworking Americans whose struggles Springsteen is famous for singing about. It’s much easier for politicians to stoke superficial patriotism than to open the doors that will allow everyday people to actually achieve the ideals American patriotism promises. Flags are far simpler.
“This is not just something to wave. This is also something to challenge, to ask questions of, to live up to,” Born in the U.S.A. video director John Sayles said on the song’s 40th anniversary.⁵
In the ten years Trump has spent substituting presidential campaigns and rallies for the Hollywood fame he still craves, the list of popular musicians who’ve spoken directly against him and the MAGA machina, publicly criticized him for using their music without authorization, and pursued legal action against his campaign is long. Some of the most prominent include: Adele, Beyoncé, Elton John, Foo Fighters, George Harrison, Guns N’ Roses, Isaac Hayes, Neil Young, Ozzy, Pharrell, Prince, R.E.M., Rihanna, Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift, Tom Petty, and Queen.⁶
The Foo Fighter released a statement that any 2024 royalties from Trump’s unauthorized use of “My Hero” or any of their other songs would be donated to the Harris/Walz campaign. In 2020, Rihanna tweeted: “me nor my people would ever be at or around one of those tragic rallies.”⁷
And this is perhaps the most pathetic reason one bitter man became the talking head for the destruction of American democracy. Trump desperately wants to be cool. And he is not. In the MAGAsphere, he uses the adoring fans he would never socialize with and the rest use him.
As a young man, USC’s film school rejected Trump. He dreamed of becoming a Hollywood mogul⁸ but aged into an aspiring dictator “who needs to be not only at the center of a media circus, but who needs to be told ritualistically over and over how great he is,” Rising Fascism in America: It Can Happen Here author Anthony DiMaggio told Rolling Stone.⁹
“The ultimate job for me would have been running MGM in the ’30s and ’40s — pre-television,” Trump said in a 1990 Playboy interview.¹⁰ Instead, as comedian John Mulaney remarked, still shocked in 2018, the guy with a cameo in Home Alone 2 is now the president of the U.S.
Trump is no mastermind politician. He is the tool being manipulated by a vast system far more sophisticated than he’ll ever be. And we’re all paying for it.
If only a “music video” that is both cringe as an adjective and a full-body verb was the most egregious offense coming out of the MAGA White House.
It remains to be seen if Usher’s legal team will issue a cease-and-desist order for the repellant “Daddy’s Home” montage. On this front, the good people of the internet stand united behind one small American dream, a dream more achievable than equitable prosperity for all: take that nauseating video down. Scrub it from the entire internet.