Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk made fun of Green Day in a New Year’s Day post on X/Twitter for changing the lyrics to their 2004 hit song, “American Idiot,” to diss former President Donald Trump as he leads in the polls for the 2024 GOP primary and general election.
“Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it,” Musk posted, along with two falling over crying laughing emojis.
Elon Musk DESTROYS Green Day after their attack on America First agenda. pic.twitter.com/rckvzoYLlD
— ACT For America (@ACTforAmerica) January 2, 2024
He left the post as a reply to a post by an X account named Not The Bee, which reports real news in the satirical style of the comedic fake news website, The Babylon Bee. Not The Bee’s post read, “Green Day tried to prove they’re still cool by changing their lyrics to slam the ‘MAGA agenda’ on TV last night,” punctuated by a clown emoji.
Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it 🤣🤣
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 1, 2024
During a New Year’s Eve performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, the rock band substituted the words, “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda,” for the original, “I’m not a part of the redneck agenda.” The California audience emitted a small cheer for the anti-Trump ad-lib. The original song’s “redneck agenda” lyrics were a reference to the presidency of George W. Bush.
The song was originally an anti-war song to protest the Iraq War. Ironically, Trump initiated the troop drawdown and an end to the U.S. war in Iraq as president to fulfill a campaign promise to bring an end to America’s “endless wars.”
It was not the first time Green Day insulted Trump. The band released a t-shirt in August with Trump’s iconic Fulton County Jail mugshot and the word “nimrod” written over his face. While nimrod came to mean an idiot in late-20th century English, its origin is in the ancient Book of Genesis as the name of a legendary hunter purported to be Noah’s great-grandson.
Fox News reported that Green Day used the MAGA version of its “American Idiot” lyric in 2019 during a performance at the iHeartRadio festival. The band’s frontman Billie Joe Armstrong chanted, “No Trump, no KKK no Fascist USA,” at the 2016 American Music Awards.
