When it comes to musicians taking on Donald Trump, rock has never been subtle. This week, Tom Morello and Neil Young reminded everyone why—escalating their ongoing feud with the newly re-inaugurated president to levels that would make even their younger selves blush.
Morello, the Rage Against the Machine guitarist who's never met a cause he wouldn't amplify through a Marshall stack, called out the Trump administration Monday for using what he identified as a Nazi mass murder slogan at a Homeland Security press conference. "BREAKING: Today the Trump admin quoted the Nazi mass murder slogan, 'One of ours, all of yours,'" Morello wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of himself with a guitar bearing an expletive-laden anti-Trump message.
The slogan appeared on a podium during Secretary Kristi Noem's January 8 press conference, following the shooting death of ICE officer Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. The phrase originated from a Nazi massacre that killed every male resident of a village in retaliation for an SS officer's death. Billboard reached out to the White House and DHS for comment but received no response—shocking absolutely no one.
But Morello wasn't alone in this latest salvo. Neil Young, rock's cantankerous conscience, posted a blistering editorial on his Neil Young Archives website that made his previous criticisms look like love letters. "Wake up people!" Young wrote with characteristic subtlety. "Today the USA is a disaster. Donald Trump is destroying America bit by bit with his staff of wannabes, people with no experience or talent, closet alcoholic wife beaters, inexperienced leaders who only know how to lie."
Young didn't stop there. In prose that would make Hunter S. Thompson nod approvingly, he continued: "We need to take Trump at his word. Make America Great Again. It won't be easy while he is trying to turn our cities into battlegrounds so he can cancel our elections with martial law and escape all accountability." His solution? "Rise up. Peacefully in millions."
This is hardly new territory for either artist. Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder spent last summer campaigning against Trump's return. The Dropkick Murphys pulled out of an entire concert series over a promoter's Trump support. These aren't performative gestures from artists desperate for relevance—though one could argue the timing is convenient for legacy acts whose streaming numbers don't quite match their cultural clout.
What's notable is the staying power of rock's anti-Trump coalition. While pop stars issue carefully worded statements parsed by publicists, and country artists maintain strategic silence, the rock world continues to deploy the same weapon it's wielded since Vietnam: righteous, often messy, occasionally contradictory fury.
Whether it moves the needle politically is debatable. Trump won re-election despite an entire genre's opposition. But rock has never been about winning—it's about making noise. And on that front, Morello and Young remain as loud as ever.
In Hollywood, nobody knows anything—except that when rock stars get political, everybody has an opinion.
