Green Day tweaked one of the band’s best-known songs to lash out at former President Donald Trump and his supporters during a televised New Year’s Eve performance Sunday night.
“I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda,” singer Billie Joe Armstrong belted out during “American Idiot” on ABC’s broadcast of “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.”
The line, changed to reference Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, is usually “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.”
The group has made the swap before, including during the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas in 2019, when Trump was in the White House. In 2016, band members also chanted, “No Trump, no KKK [Ku Klux Klan], no fascist USA,” during a performance of the song “Bang Bang” at the American Music Awards shortly after Trump won that year’s presidential election.
Armstrong was even blunter during a private party in 2018.
“I f—ing hate Donald Trump so much,” he said, according to a Variety report. “I used to scream I hated George Bush. This one is a little different. This one is bad, it’s like acid gone bad.”
Green Day, which was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, has a new album coming out later this month. The group wrote on YouTube that “Saviors” will be about: “Power pop, punk, rock, indie triumph. disease, war, inequality, influencers, yoga retreats, alt right, dating apps, masks, MENTAL HEALTH, climate change, oligarchs, social media division, free weed, fentanyl, fragility.”
The first track, “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” was released in autumn.