Why is Donald Trump weaponising the YMCA?
Standing as the defining image of Donald Trump‘s re-election victory, the grand finale act that took Washington DC’s Capital One Arena to celebrate the 47th US president’s pre-inauguration rally may appear confusing to those uninitiated with his uniquely glitzy jamboree of party patriotism.
Following country dregs such as ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ singer Billy Ray Cyrus, Detroit-born rapper turned Southern boy Kid Rock, and Republican song veteran Lee Greenwood of ‘God Bless the USA’ infamy, Trump let loose his signature fist-pumping boogie as he was flanked by camp disco statesman Village People, founding member and lead singer Victor Willis donned in black leather motorcycle gear and performing their defining 1978 hit ‘YMCA’.
On the face of it, it’s an unusual de facto anthem for the Make America Great Again movement. Ostensibly a high-energy pop hit celebrating the social opportunities and brotherly relationships to be had at the over 12,000 Young Men’s Christian Association hostels around the world, the disco sing-a-long has long been a fixture of gay culture with its implicit lyrical hints at the YMCA’s popular hookup hotspots, an innuendo deliberately left ambiguous eager to appeal to the disco scene’s fervently gay fanbase as revealed by mastermind Jacques Morali to Rolling Stone. The only single from Village People‘s Crusin’, ‘YMCA’s iconic video (and it is iconic) dancing ‘macho men’ including the construction worker, figure-hugging uniformed cop, and soft Tom of Finland-styled leather biker all deliberately assembled to comport to popular homoerotic fantasies of modern masculine archetypes.
The Village People’s anthem’s very un-conservative foundations haven’t stopped ‘YMCA’ from enjoying a ubiquitous presence at Trump rallies since his second re-election bid in 2020. In the same year of its induction to the National Recording Registry of the US Library of Congress for its “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” value, ‘YMCA’ gained renewed political relevance when blasted during the pandemic’s anti-lockdown protests, its natural ideological convergence with Trump’s electoral base seeing protesters switching the letters ‘YMCA’ with ‘MAGA’ in the run-up to Trump’s failed November re-election bid that year.
Trump does have to work with what he’s got. Lacking an orderly queue of music’s biggest names eager to associate with Maga, let alone perform on stage with him, everyone from ABBA, Foo Fighters, Celine Dion, Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones, and Aerosmith have all publicly stated their displeasure or issued cease-and-desist letters over their songs hijacked for Trump’s election campaigns over the years. Most infamously was the use of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Fortunate Son‘, an attack on the capital class’ privileged Vietnam draft dodgers Mr ‘Bone Spurs’ Trump directly benefited from, CCR frontman and lifelong Democrat John Fogerty aghast at the campaign’s obliviousness to the song’s excoriating strike against the elite they’re bankrolled by.
Another artist who took similar objection was, oddly enough, Village People’s Willis. In June 2020, Willis sent an official order instructing Maga to quit playing his group’s tracks, including Trump’s favourite ‘Macho Man’. A change of heart was felt after Trump’s electoral win; however, “The financial benefits have been great,” Willis stated on Facebook in December. “YMCA is estimated to gross several million dollars since the President-elect’s continued use of the song. Therefore, I’m glad I allowed the President-elect’s continued use of ‘YMCA’. And I thank him for choosing to use my song.” Willis’ malleable values have served him well commercially, ‘YMCA’ reaching 15 on the TikTok Billboard top 50 and straight to number one on the Dance/Electronic Digital Song Sales.
While whatever sexual subversion or racy undertones to ‘YMCA’ have long been scrubbed away from countless wedding-disco conga lines and family fun cruises pushing them firmly into the mainstream, Village People still inhabit a cultural space on art’s fringes far away from critical acclaim or the consensus terrain of esteemed good and important music. This is half the appeal for Maga, a movement that’s powerfully motivated by a contempt for the liberal celebrity and media class and their perceived remote disconnect from the everyday concerns of blue-collar middle-America, a view only reinforced by a ruthlessly corporate Democrat administration receiving glowing adulation from large swathes of Hollywood’s biggest names.
Spiked with a sour grapes rejection of big-name endorsement, Trump and his Maga base see Willis’ Village people as ‘one of them’, an act left by the wayside from the hated chattering classes and lofty media gatekeepers intent on blocking conservatism from ever taking hold in the cultural sphere. The ensuing liberal ridicule, therefore, is the point, reinforcing the culture of besiegement among Maga’s collective grievance complex over being the targets of scoffing disrespect from an ivory tower elite, born from political and economic collapse but directed toward the migrant or the trans kid by the capital class doing the collapsing.
As well as a trollish delight in confounding jocularity, a residue that still lingers from Maga’s 4chan alt-right foundations, the deep-seated authoritarian desire for a return to machismo lurks in Trump’s appeal to the Christian nationalism so animated by Village People’s dancing paragons of American masculinity. As disturbingly realised by conservative pundit Tucker Carlson’s deeply creepy “daddy’s home” speech at a Georgia Trump rally last year, Carlson’s fantasy of physically disciplining an unruly society of protesters and left-wing challenge was music to the ears of the cheering Maga base, delighting in spreading the ‘strict father’ model of violence toward women and children from the home and against dissent into public life.
For many in the audience performing ‘YMCA’s semaphore dancing, however, Village People simply represent nostalgia. Notions of national decline and the need for a strongman to return and instil social order and a return to ‘greatness’ are potent foundations for a fascist trajectory, and it can start with a benign wistfulness for an imagined time that’s distorted in your memory. “I don’t think you can separate Trump and his base from nostalgia,” Dr A Jamie Saris, an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Maynooth University, told BBC. “They want a do-over. That is, they want to relive certain moments that they have in their brains, such as when America was great; they just don’t want to deal with the contradictions. Disco was problematic for a lot of kids at the time, but now the same people who used to be uncomfortable with it are saying, ‘The 1970s were great! My back didn’t hurt!'”
The cruel irony is that the ‘happier, simpler time’ reminisced by Maga is fundamentally felt by all of the working class and the broader electorate. Generally speaking, things were better, helped by a post-war settlement kept in check by an organised labour force that ensured wages were in line with inflation and financial security infinitely more achievable, long before Reagan’s free-market fundamentalism deindustrialised communities robbed them of hope and a stake in society, and a deregulated liberal and conservative media gaslit them about their valid economic woes.
This malaise and fury have to go somewhere, and it can either be articulated by class politics or the continued culture war that only distracts from the growing corporate enmeshing of capital and politics into a bleakly oligarchical future. While the sight of big finance honchos and Silicon Valley billionaires toadying up to the new Trump administration may evoke despair, take a leaf from ‘YMCA’: “There’s no need to feel down… pick yourself off the ground,” and pour your efforts into joining grassroots alternatives.
