In 2017, the narrator in country hitmaker Chris Janson’s song “Fix a Drink” seemed exhausted by party politics.
“I turn on Fox News and then CNN/But it’s the same dang thing all over again,” Janson sings in the bouncy pop-country tune, looking for a way out of the cultural fray. “The world’s in the toilet and the market’s in the tank/Well, I can’t fix that, but I can fix a drink.”
Janson’s hit single was emblematic of the type of feel-good country music that Nashville churned out during the first few years of the first Trump administration, as the industry grappled with how to address the polarization that the 2016 election had supercharged. The answer was songs primarily about bipartisan, boozy escapism that also preached civility and offered, per one Kenny Chesney single, a breezy roadmap for healing division: “Buy a boat/Drink a beer/Sing a song/Make a friend/Can’t we all get along?” Chesney asked in “Get Along,” a chart-topper.
Eight years later, however, the message being peddled by Nashville’s country music industry shows signs of marked change, just like that of many corporations, universities, op-ed pages, and American institutions from CBS to the CDC. The MAGA movement, emboldened by winning the presidency and both houses of Congress, has gone mainstream in this distinctly reactionary period in American culture. In many cases, embracing MAGA has proven to be good for business too, and Music Row has rushed to get onboard.
Case in point: When Janson was readying a new album to be released during Trump’s second term, he previewed it with “I Don’t Give a Damn,” a song that struck a different tone than that of “Fix a Drink.” “I’m done apologizing/I’m standing for the flag,” the proud Trump supporter sang, before staking an overtly political claim: “The left ain’t right/And the right ain’t wrong.”
“This is exactly the way I feel right now,” he said in a TikTok video.
Janson’s pivot is only one example of the overt MAGA-fication of Music Row, which began to reveal itself immediately following Trump’s second presidential win in 2024: Trump was no longer a figure to shy away from, but one to embrace. In December of that year, right after the election, Jelly Roll chatted with the president-elect and hammed it up with Speaker Mike Johnson at a UFC fight. At Trump’s inauguration the next month, Carrie Underwood sang “America the Beautiful” and Parker McCollum performed Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” at the Commander-in-Chief Ball — and they were two much more mainstream names than that of Keith himself, who was years past his commercial peak when he performed at Trump’s first inaugural alongside Lee Greenwood.
Since then, the floodgates have only opened. Zach Bryan posed for a photo op with Trump at last February’s Super Bowl, Cody Johnson railed against the “No Kings” movement during a June concert (“Protest the protests!” he implored his audience), and the typically apolitical Keith Urban performed at a private Mar-a-Lago function for a Trump donor in November, at which President Trump stopped by.
Meanwhile, upstarts like Warren Zeiders, Gavin Adcock, and Nate Smith have been openly championing Trump. After Zeiders appeared on Fox News’ One Nation show, Trump posted, “Warren Zeiders is FANTASTIC. Go to his concerts, and ENJOY!” Adcock posted Instagram videos of himself driving his truck over Biden campaign signs in the run-up to Election Day and went on an expletive-laden rant about the former president onstage at a concert. During a September concert in Chicago, Smith broke down in tears after he donned a red MAGA hat. “Being able to live fully authentic to who I am in front of everybody just felt right,” he said afterward. “And it felt good and it felt free.”
“It’s a different climate than it was, let’s say, the first time he ran,” conservative country singer Justin Moore recently told Fox News. “Trump being back in office, I think it has emboldened more people to speak out.”
WHEN SOME CRITICS USE THE PHRASE “Music Row” as shorthand for Nashville’s country music industry, it can suggest a shadowy cabal making sinister decisions to pair homogenized music with white identity politics. But the reality is that Music Row is simply a business: a string of corporations and mid-level managers with bosses who have bosses, all in the service of making money by turning music into commerce. If there is any unifying principle underlying Music Row, it’s a keen understanding of where the marketplace has landed, what it will tolerate and what it will not.
During Trump’s first administration, that meant avoiding him as best as possible and treating politics as just another problem that a beer or a boat can help listeners forget. That calculation has shifted: Just as corporations have retreated from the DEI initiatives they installed over the past few years, the major record labels and multinational corporations that make up the commercial country music industry have largely backtracked from both the late-2010s era of songs about national unity and the early-2020s era of gestures toward social change. Artists on Capitol Nashville, the label that released Mickey Guyton’s “Black Like Me” in 2020, now perform at Mar-a-Lago. As for Guyton, the genre’s voice for open-mindedness and tolerance, who just a few years ago became the first Black woman to co-host the ACM Awards? She spent the past year far away from Nashville, competing on a singing competition series in China.
The path to how Music Row arrived here can be traced to two pivotal moments. The first was the 2020 election of Joe Biden, which radicalized many of country music’s conservative-leaning artists, resulting in election denialism, spats between stars over trans rights, and one member of the most popular country duo of the 2010s unfollowing the other in what was speculated to be over political differences. (In a recent interview, Florida Georgia Line’s Tyler Hubbard refuted that theory, claiming the split had everything to do with career decisions and nothing to do with partisan politics.)
The other was in August of 2023, when in the span of a few weeks, two songs fueled by the right-wing-media echo chamber hit Number One on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 chart: Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” a product of Music Row, and Oliver Anthony’s insurgent “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
Seeing that conservative grievance politics could generate a profit, other artists leaned into MAGA music. Florida Georgia Line’s Brian Kelley released a song in 2024 called “Make America Great Again,” and a who’s who of country singers who’d aged out of the charts — Thompson Square, Gretchen Wilson, Jerrod Niemann, and perennial shit-stirrer John Rich — teamed up to take a stab at their own song of that title. Last month, Drew Baldridge, another country upstart, released “Rebel,” a song in which he pledges to “stand my ground, ain’t gonna back down.” Earlier this fall, he promoted the track with a direct-to-camera post that used footage he filmed of men allegedly restraining a belligerent customer at an Australian McDonald’s. “In that moment, it just hit me, this is what my song ‘Rebel’ is about,” he said. “It’s about standing up for what is right.”
Country music websites also seem to be making the MAGA shift. In a May post about Morgan Wallen, the country lifestyle publication Whiskey Riff called out the “virtue-signaling media who has spent the past 10 years pushing cancel culture.” A recent post about Kid Rock labeling the media “Public Enemy #1” after Charlie Kirk’s assassination echoed Rock’s statement: “So who is to blame for stoking this fire of lies… well, the liberal media of course.”
Opry Entertainment Group, the parent company of the Grand Ole Opry, owns a minority, non-controlling interest in Whiskey Riff. And the Opry, too, has found its own ways to meet the MAGA faction where they are. When the 100-year-old institution invited Jelly Roll to become its latest member, it did so not within the sacred confines of the Opry House but in a segment during Jelly’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which, despite having guests that range from Bernie Sanders to Trump, has become closely associated with the cultural ascendance of MAGA.
“I bet I’m the first person to ever get invited to the Grand Ole Opry on a podcast!” Jelly Roll said.
It’s not a coincidence that Christian music has been surging in popularity on Music Row at the same time MAGA has captured the culture. Artists like Anne Wilson, Gabby Barrett, and Jelly Roll, all with label homes in Nashville, have actively courted and won over both country and Contemporary Christian Music audiences. Meanwhile, American Idol — whose judges panel is now primarily made up of country artists, including Underwood and Luke Bryan — is experiencing a rebirth as a praise-music launching pad. The mainstream country and Christian music industries have never been closer.
Onstage at this month’s AmericaFest, the annual conference hosted by Kirk’s organization Turning Point, Aldean and his wife, Brittany, spoke openly about their role as country-music flag-wavers for the MAGA movement.
“I think we live in a country now where if you’re a Christian, you’re made to feel like that’s a bad thing,” Jason Aldean said. “When you’re in the situation we’re in, you have an obligation to speak out when you hear and see things that don’t seem right.”
The year in country music ended much like it started: With a major star standing just feet from the president. At this month’s newly Trump-ified Kennedy Center Honors, George Strait was among the recipients, watching as artists like Miranda Lambert, Brooks & Dunn, and Vince Gill sang his praises. As Gill ended his heartfelt performance of Strait’s “Troubadour,” he pointed up to the box where the King of Country Music was sitting. Directly next to Strait was Donald Trump.Photographs in Illustration
Images used in illustration: Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images; Kevin Lamarque – Pool/Getty Images; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images; Scott Legato/Getty Images
Colombia's Environmental Minister Irene Vélez Torres, left, embraces Stientje van Veldhoven, minister of climate policy and green growth of the Netherlands, at the end of a conference aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels, on April 29, 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Don’t Overlook This Surprising Climate Victory
This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Good news about climate change? Hard to believe, but yes. It happened last week in the coal-exporting city of Santa Marta, Colombia, and it ranks as the most promising climate news since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.
For the first time, a critical mass of the world economy is working together to phase out fossil fuels, a step that scientists have long said is imperative to limit global temperature rise to an amount civilization can survive. This counts as good news not least because it shows that meaningful change is possible, a belief that has been hard to sustain over the past decade. Equally important is what made the Santa Marta breakthrough possible: the advocates of phasing out fossil fuels stopped waiting for the producers of fossil fuels to agree to stop. Instead, advocates will simply stop buying their products.
From April 24 to 29, 57 countries representing most of the biggest economies on Earth gathered in Santa Marta for the First Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels, where they pledged to phase out burning oil, gas, and coal, the main driver of global warming. The phase-out will not take place overnight but over the years immediately ahead. France, for example, says it will eliminate coal by 2027, oil by 2045, and gas by 2050. Each country will devise a voluntary national plan to “disentangle their economies and societies” from fossil fuels, said Stientje van Veldhoven, the minister of the environment and housing for The Netherlands, which co-sponsored the conference with Colombia.
Calling themselves “a coalition of the willing,” these 57 countries — including Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Brazil, Canada, and Spain, and joined by California, the world’s fifth biggest economy — make up the largest economic bloc on Earth. Their combined gross domestic product of $38.5 trillion (according to April 2026 data from the International Monetary Fund) is larger than the GDP of the US ($32.4 trillion) and almost twice as large as that of China ($20.9 trillion).
These countries also account for roughly 30 percent of current global consumption of fossil fuels. If they make good on their pledges to phase out fossil fuels, it will slash demand for those fuels. A basic law of economics is that lower demand leads to lower prices. (At the moment, the world is experiencing the flip side of this law, as oil and gas prices soar due to the supply restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz.) Lower prices for fossil fuels mean lower revenues for fossil fuel producers, which could prove fatal for the profitability of many current and planned projects and infrastructure.
The Santa Marta conference benefitted from an unanticipated coincidence of timing: the Iran war has triggered a historic energy crisis that is causing countries to lose faith in the reliability and affordability of oil and gas. On the second day of the conference, the head of the International Energy Agency declared that the war had broken global energy markets beyond repair. “The damage is done,” Fatih Birol said in an interview with The Guardian. Predicting “permanent consequences” for the fossil fuel industry, Birol said countries will increasingly turn to more secure and less costly renewable energy sources, including by switching to electricity to run transportation and other sectors that historically relied on fossil fuels.
Irene Velez Torres, the environment minister of Colombia, welcomed Birol’s remarks. “Our energy sovereignty as well as our climate survival require moving to other energy sources,” she said in an interview.
To be sure, the transition away from fossil fuels promised in Santa Marta has not happened yet, and there is plenty of room between the lip and the cup. But the economic heft of the Santa Marta coalition of the willing is undeniable, and its biggest members — Germany, California, the UK, France — have already made significant progress toward a non-fossil fueled future. Indeed, a core purpose of the Santa Marta conference was for participants to share lessons with one another about how best to leave fossil fuels behind. “This conference is not about [negotiating] documents,” said Rachel Kyte, the UK special representative for climate. “It’s about finding fellow travelers and learning from them — what’s working, what isn’t?”
The fact that the Santa Marta conference got little news coverage in the U.S. and that its greatest power lies in the realm of economics rather than politics may help explain why many observers have not yet recognized its game-changing potential. From the time climate change first emerged on the global agenda with the United Nations “Earth Summit” in 1992, the dominant narrative has measured progress through the lens of politics: how many governments sign legally binding agreements to limit global temperature rise, and by how much? This prioritizing of politics is no surprise: most of the people involved in these negotiations — the diplomats conducting them, the scientists and activists seeking to influence them, the journalists covering them — regard governments as the decisive actors in international affairs and have little or no training in economics.
This approach has yielded little progress. With the important exception of the Paris Agreement, where virtually all of the world’s countries agreed to limit temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and to aim for 1.5 degrees, the annual UN climate summits have been long on talk and short on action. Most of their elaborately negotiated agreements did not even mention the words “fossil fuels,” even though phasing them out is the core challenge.
The UN process has fallen short largely because a loophole gives fossil fuel-producing countries a de facto veto over final agreements. UN summits are conducted under UN rules, which require consensus decision making. “Consensus” does not mean “unanimous,” but it does mean that a handful of countries can block what a vast majority wants. That’s what happened at the COP30 summit last November, when Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in blocking a call by 85 countries to begin drawing up a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.
The Santa Marta conference organizers skirted these obstacles by operating separately from the UN process and inviting only participants that had shown a genuine commitment to moving beyond fossil fuels. That meant no U.S. and no China. The proceedings were not diverted into debating whether fossil fuels need to go but rather could focus on how to make that happen, and to do so while protecting workers, businesses, and communities that currently rely on fossil fuels for jobs, profits, and tax revenues.
Santa Marta is only a first step. In a world where fossil fuels account for roughly 80 percent of total energy use, leaving them behind is no small task, as The Netherlands itself illustrates. In the same week that it was co-sponsoring the Santa Marta conference, the Dutch government approved plans to increase offshore gas production. Asked about this contradiction, Minister van Veldhoven explained that the supply disruptions stemming from the Iran war meant that in the short term The Netherlands could obtain the gas its residents and businesses need only by producing its own or buying it from Russia, and the latter course was worse on both energy security and climate grounds. This conundrum, she added, “illustrates the very difficult issues facing us and all countries as we try to disentangle ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels.”
Very difficult, yes. But for the first time in a long time, Santa Marta offers plausible hope that humanity can phase out fossil fuels in time to avoid catastrophe. A critical mass of leaders is no longer waiting for the countries that make money and wield power by producing fossil fuels to agree to stop doing so, something they clearly have no intention of doing. Instead, those leaders are responding to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people — 80 to 89 percent of them, according to peer-reviewed scientific studies — want their governments to take stronger climate action. “This is not the end,” Velez said in the conference’s closing moments. “It is the beginning of a new global climate democracy.”
Author and journalist Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for The Nation and the executive director of Covering Climate Now.