In the quaintly upsetting era of George W Bush’s presidency, there was something people liked to pompously call the “cultural opposition”. This was made up of figures in popular culture pushing back against Bush, and 20 years later it may be imagined their spiritual heirs are limbering up for equivalent duties. The first formal opportunity falls next week with Donald Trump’s inauguration and, just as leaders in the tech and business worlds have failed spectacularly to rally against him, so a sense prevails that among certain artists and influencers there has been a gentle softening of spines too.
This is a general observation and also one located in the figure of Carrie Underwood, the country star scheduled to sing the national anthem in Trump’s honour on Monday. Underwood, a 41-year-old who came to prominence via the fourth season of American Idol, may seem a slim figure on whom to hang observations about the waning of cultural opposition towards Trump. There persists a feeling, however, that in 2016, no singer-songwriter of Underwood’s prominence would have offered her services to the Trump administration. Back then, when Trump’s election struck many in the US and around the world with the force of an out-of-body experience, the best the inauguration committee could come up with was another talent-show graduate and holder of the unfortunate mantle “former child star”, Jackie Evancho.
By contrast, Underwood is a multi-platinum artist who has won eight Grammys. She is not Lady Gaga, who appeared at Joe Biden’s inauguration. Nor is she Beyoncé (Barack Obama), Aretha Franklin (also Obama) or even Jennifer Lopez (Biden). But she is a big name with a huge following, and her willingness to appear for Trump follows a general pattern of appeasement publicly justified as “why can’t we all get along?” national unity. Life is a journey, after all, and glancing down the inaugural set list, we can see how far some of next week’s artists-for-Trump have come. Victor Willis, for example, the only original member still in the disco group the Village People, has enjoyed a growth mindset that has taken him from sending cease-and-desist letters to Trump in 2020 demanding he stop using his 1978 hit Macho Man at his rallies, to making himself available for the inauguration weekend and assuring everyone he is not a “Trump hater”.
To be fair to the American cultural elite, the rest of the lineup for Trump’s inaugural festivities is pretty low grade, involving, as inevitably as a cockroach rising after a nuclear event, Kid Rock, as well as Billy Ray Cyrus and classical singer Christopher Macchio (no idea either). Plus the now reformed Village People, still led by Willis, who recently claimed, thrillingly, that YMCA wasn’t ever supposed to be a gay anthem and whose wife threatened to sue anyone who said otherwise. All the inauguration needs at this point is Marilyn Manson dithering about on stage like a Camden Market goth from the 1990s, and it will have found its perfect level.
Underpinning these cultural wobbles, of course, is the momentous backsliding towards Trump of US money. Meta, Apple, Amazon and Google have collectively contributed millions to the inauguration fund, as have BP, Boeing, Delta, Uber and, with a nice touch of irony, the trading-platform-for-little-people, Robinhood. This is opportunism of a kind that singers and artists at least have the decency to hide in other parts of the world, rather than shove under American noses. (I’m thinking vaguely of Beyoncé, and Kylie, while we’re at it – both of whom played for millions of dollars at private events in Dubai, where their gay fans enjoy the risk of imprisonment.)
Anyway, as usual, next week the job of being more morally rigorous than everyone else falls to Michelle Obama, who in defiance of protocol will not be attending the inauguration (she skipped Jimmy Carter’s funeral, too, a decision it is imagined was rooted in Trump-avoidance). She is an outlier. In 2009, President Obama capped individual contributions to his inauguration fund at $50,000, but of course Trump hasn’t done that, and so great and unseemly has been the rush to donate that there’s likely to be a surplus, which it is said will go towards the Donald J Trump presidential library. And if you are smirking at the oxymoron of the words “Trump library”, then you simply don’t believe in national unity and are precisely why the man was elected in the first place.
