Whose music is MAGA stealing this time?

Thanks to President Donald Trump’s budgetary largesse, the Department of Homeland Security has a lot of money to produce splashy videos designed to entice people to join the ranks of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. None of that money apparently went to paying Jay-Z for the use of his song “Public Announcement” as the soundtrack, leading to copyright takedown notices on X, Instagram, and Facebook. Whoopsie. 

Well, it isn’t really a mistake. In all likelihood, no mid-level bureaucrat merely forgot to get permission for the song. Indeed, the administration already used the song in a different video, with a remixed version as the audio for first-person footage of an immigration raid at a Home Depot in Los Angeles. That raid likely violated a court order, but honestly, that’s just standard operating procedure for this administration by now. 

Using songs without permission is part of an effort by the administration to leverage the cultural cachet of musicians to boost its image. The problem for the administration is that musicians generally hate them and do not want them to use their music, because normal people do not want to provide the soundtrack for Trump’s racist, nativist, authoritarian crackdown. 

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It was only two weeks ago that British singer Jess Glynne came forward to say she was “sick” that her song “Hold My Hand” was used as the background for a White House video on X showing ICE agents loading handcuffed deportees onto a plane. And it was only a couple of weeks before that when Metallica was forced to issue a takedown notice to get the Department of Defense to remove an instrumental version of “Enter Sandman” from a video of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bragging about how he will “unleash American drone superiority” and signing a memo delivered by drone. Man, that’s so cringe. Who would want their song attached to that?

Like all bad things, this started with Trump, whose campaign rallies routinely featured songs that the campaign didn’t clear with the artists, often deliberately choosing artists who opposed him. White Stripes? Check. Foo Fighters? Check. Beyoncé? Check. Even if these artists were all absolutely hyped to be Trump’s walk-on music, the campaign generally never asks for permission to use songs or pays to use them. 

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Having your music played as part of an effort to get Trump elected is bad enough, but having it used as part of the administration’s white supremacist vision is likely far worse. DHS isn’t just dog-whistling about white supremacy on its social media accounts. It’s screaming about white supremacy on its social media accounts. There is the persistent evocation of nativist buzzwords, calling on people to snitch on “foreign invaders” and urging people to “defend your culture.” There are also posts that are meant to tip off fellow white nationalists that the administration is down with white supremacy too, such as this “Which way, American man?” X post. It’s meant to evoke the book, “Which Way, Western Man,” written by a white supremacist, published by a neo-Nazi, and chock full of antisemitic and racist tropes. 

But it’s the DHS recruitment videos, like the one that used Jay-Z’s song without permission, that are the bleakest. There’s all this money to hire new ICE agents—roughly 10,000 of them!—but people are not chomping at the bit to become masked thugs. Hence the elimination of the age limit and bribing retirees to come back. But that just gets you a bunch of grandpas, you know? You gotta make it cool to join ICE, which is why their videos look like video games and play songs you like. But it all has an air of “How do you do, fellow kids?”—a grasping, yet always failing, attempt to be cool. 

And that’s the real problem for conservatives. They know they have no appealing culture to attach to their promotional efforts. There are only so many times you can use “God Bless the USA.” But all is not lost. Trump just named a whole bunch of hip, new, relevant artists as Kennedy Center honorees. Perhaps they can ask KISS or George Strait to whip up some tunes about how great it is to have a job where you arrest nursing mothers and kids with leukemia. That’s sure to be a hit. 

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