“Sleepy Joe has got to go,” comes blaring out of a DeWalt boombox to a West Coast-style hip-hop beat, the grandfather—clad in jeans, a black T-shirt and a Trump hat—scanning Selvig’s face for a change in expression.
“She came up with the chorus,” he says, nodding his head along with the beat.
Selvig nods his head along. Then, he pauses. “What do you think of the left indoctrinating children?” he asks, an apparent nod to Republican talking points about LGBTQ curriculum in schools and a “woke” doctrine in media like music and television.
The man, who is unnamed, doesn’t hesitate.
“Oh my goodness. This is what happened in Nazi Germany,” he says, possibly hinting at the creation of groups like the Hitler Youth, a paramilitary boys organization formed prior to World War II. “This is what happened in Russia.”
“You and your 7-year-old granddaughter, you’re writing all these songs about how Trump is bad…” Selvig continues.
“We’ve got other songs,” the grandfather says. “The ones we put on here are definitely pro-country.”
It’s not the first song a child—with an adult’s help—has written about Trump. A Trump rally in Pensacola, Florida, in 2016 notably featured the USA Freedom Kids, a three-girl troupe who performed a glossily produced song and dance number about Trump’s greatness. There have also been a number of anti-Trump songs, including one well-known example by a 13-year-old girl that made national headlines in the lead-up to the 2016 Republican primaries. Trump rallies have also long been family affairs, even eliciting a photo essay in The New York Times about the children one of the newspaper’s top photographers observed at some of them.
But the song presented another curious dichotomy between the policies of a man who has long accused U.S. public schools of indoctrinating children and the actions of those who support him. In May, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee came under fire for his book, The Kids Guide to President Trump, a tome intended to teach kids “all about President Trump’s accomplishments and his vision for America.”
Around the same time, Kash Patel—a former Trump staffer now at the center of a legal firestorm around Trump’s handling of classified documents—released his own children’s book containing a revisionist history of the FBI inquiry into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia during the 2016 election. Trump himself has proposed his own “patriotic” curriculum for schools as an antidote to lessons about civil rights and other less-than-flattering moments in American history, which some have equated to propaganda.
