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
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at a press conference in Ottawa, Ontario, on Aug. 22, 2026.
How Mark Carney Became Leader of the Free World by Standing Up to Trump
In Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Donald Trump has finally met an adversary who truly understands the art of the deal — and it could threaten the entire premise of his presidency.
There have been many self-inflicted catalysts to Donald Trump’s ruination: epic corruption, inflation and the soaring price of gas, the ceaseless angry old man posts and memes, ICE’s assault on the rule of law, the Supreme Court’s mullah-like extremism, his vanity, self-pity, cruelty, and of course the unprovoked, catastrophic failed war on Iran. They are all derived from Trump’s delusional belief in his nonexistent superpowers. But the downfall of Trump will also be forever dated to a small, inexplicable and quixotic folly: his attack on Canada.
Despite the president’s incessant, bizarre claims that he can destroy Canada economically as he wages a trade war against America’s neighbor to the north, in the last few weeks Prime Minister Carney has quietly but effectively ended Trump’s ability to lead the free world in any way other than as an extortion racket and disorganized crime syndicate.
In a potlatch, in the tradition of indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, a head man would display his tribe’s wealth and power by lighting their most precious possessions on fire. The destruction appeared pointless to European eyes, but First Nations peoples understood the significance of the rite: If the chieftain of the tribe could squander incredible riches, what possible hope did a rival have in waging war against such an overwhelmingly powerful enemy? The mindless waste of resources in a potlatch, as every Canadian schoolchild learns, was actually a finely tuned demonstration of dominance, and a way to avoid conflict.
Trump, the self-described big chief of America, has concocted a new and perverse version of the potlatch that better resembles setting himself on fire. By lawlessly declaring an unprovoked trade war on Canada, Trump has set alight the most valuable assets of the United States: international alliances, the Constitution, respect, friendship, trust, goodwill, the rule of law (hell, the whole idea of law). Instead of displaying his power, Trump has demonstrated his fundamental weakness and loosening grip on reality. In Trump’s form of chaotic destruction, with his historical illiteracy and rat-like cunning combined with his desire to humiliate his perceived enemies, he isn’t pursuing trade policy or a geopolitical strategy. For Trump, domination is the point. The absurdity of farmers and fishermen and auto workers on both sides of the Canadian border having their lives set ablaze in service of the president’s ego trip is the end in itself.
Measured in a simpleton’s economic terms, America appears to have the upper hand in a trade war with Canada. The economy of the United States is more than a dozen times as large as Canada’s, so a trade war that represents a national cataclysm north of the border will barely register in Trump’s America. Trump’s pretextual use of an alleged “trade deficit” to justify his trade wars is concocted according to his whims, urged on by fanatical anti-trade sycophants and enablers, the ever-changing metric a means of blackmail, the nonstop stream of insults and half-witted social media posts somehow managing to be simultaneously enraging and mind-numbingly boring to my fellow Canadians.
“Just watch,” Trump trolled last week as he promised to gratuitously punish Canada, like an old drunk sitting in his underwear yelling at his television set — only with the powers of the commander-in-chief. “All we have to do to cut our trade deficit with a country is not trade with them,” he said in the Oval Office over Labor Day weekend, adding that America will also stop trading with Europe, Mexico, and Switzerland, threatening in one unhinged rant to end trillions of dollars in commerce. As if to underscore his madness, he followed it up with a meme showing the American colors covering all of North America, as well as Greenland and Iceland. But for reasons known only to himself, he has focused his true menace on my home and native land: “If we don’t do any trading with Canada, if we just end all trade with Canada, we’d save ourselves $90 billion. Canada would be in a heap of trouble. I don’t think they’d exist. Because, again, they do 95 percent of their business with us.”
If you don’t think this is the unhinged talk of a confused old fool showing signs of dementia, take a look at the bond market.
After Trump illegally breached America’s free trade agreement with Canada last year, imposing tariffs that were based on transparent lies about fentanyl crossing the border, he proceeded to gaslight America’s ally with a steady stream of infantile ALL CAPS derision.
Living inside a constant reality TV show, with fake deadlines and formulaic melodrama, Trump then imposed a 30-day timeline for a new accord, or he would unilaterally impose additional 50-percent tariffs relying on a never-before-used statutory justification — a preposterous gambit under America’s binding trade treaty with Canada. Confronted with the prospect of constantly changing trade terms in an increasingly lawless America, Prime Minister Carney didn’t take the bait, engaging in talks in good faith but with eyes wide open (and elbows up, as they say in Canada). Using one of the oldest tricks from an increasingly pathetic and obvious set of bullying tactics, Trump then prematurely announced that a deal with Canada had been reached when there was no such agreement — an attempt to box Carney in. But again, Carney didn’t cave like so many other world leaders.
Like the many con men I’ve written about over the years, Trump is convinced of his own genius, certain that the world is a ship of fools and that he — and he alone — can see through the tissue of lies and deceptions. The problem, inevitably, is that grifters are never as smart as they think they are, a fatal flaw compounded when they start to believe their own lies — and then encounter someone who can see through their act.
As his second term has illustrated, Trump is certain that everyone will cow in the face of his “Hulk Smash”: the Supreme Court, television networks, Ivy League universities, white shoe law firms, the abject former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer chasing after the president’s windblown papers like a schoolboy — an image that quickened his downfall. Changing the basic terms of the proposed agreement at the last moment is a classic power play in any negotiation. So it was with Canada this summer. At the last minute before Trump’s invented time limit expired, as the clock ticked towards midnight, Trump’s minions attacked Canada’s profoundly important French culture — ridiculing the notion that there is such a thing as a distinct Canadian nation at all. He slapped tariffs on the automobile industry, lumber, steel, aluminum, and for kicks and giggles, hockey sticks to shove his version of reality directly up the ass of the milquetoast Canadians.
Under the new terms Trump purported to impose, the United States (which is to say Trump) would have control over any other Canadian trade agreements. Trump then reserved the right to change the deal at any time in the future, for any reason, with no notice — meaning the deal wouldn’t be worth the pencil it was written in, as Carney noted.
Lake Ontario, that’s now Lake America, and your prime minister is a governor, and you’re going to wish that you were the 51st state by the time I get through with you.
But then something bizarre happened to Trump’s bonfire of the vanities. In Carney, the president discovered that he had encountered a man who was not looking for a fight — but who equally wasn’t afraid of him. For all the bluster and menace and braggadocio, Trump didn’t realize that he had walked into a trap. By agreeing for negotiations to happen this summer, a year ahead of the larger deal for the renewal of the North American treaty, Carney had picked the time and place for the inevitable looming confrontation; with Trump vulnerable in the coming election, the canny Carney had managed to create real leverage. Carney then cleverly enlarged the dispute and raised the stakes by accurately calling America’s attack a declaration of war, surprising the flat-footed American negotiators who apparently didn’t take Trump’s threats seriously themselves — adding another layer of leverage to Canada’s supposedly weak hand.
In Carney, it turned out, Trump has met a leader of real strength, the understated but steely and confident kind reflecting Canada’s national character. The irony is that Carney was elected last year almost entirely as a result of Trump’s Kafkaesque trade war, defeating a weak-kneed conservative who very likely would have meekly submitted to America’s neocolonialist threats. Another irony is that the politically inexperienced Carney turns out to have genius-level instincts. The whippet-thin banker is an unassuming figure, the opposite of Trump, but every bit as ruthless in his way. He is a self-made man and intellectual with degrees from Harvard and Oxford, who epitomizes the meritocracy. The child of schoolteachers in the far north Alberta, raised in a home that prized education and social responsibility, Carney earned his way to the absolute heights of global finance through his intelligence and diligence. His resume is almost a parody of accomplishment, with stints as the head of the banks of both Canada and England, as well as years with Goldman Sachs and working for the likeminded businessman-turned-politician Michael Bloomberg. Faced with the global financial crisis of 2008 and then Brexit, Carney witnessed the idiocies of economic self-destruction in the 21st century, preparing him with a unique set of experiences to confront Trump’s lawless trade war — to Canada’s great good fortune.
In truth, Carney was elected specifically to deal with such a crisis, and Canada has had decades to prepare for this conflagration. Living next to an elephant requires a certain amount of caution and awareness, so Canadians understand American politics down to the last looney. Knowing your enemy is the greatest asset in war, as the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu said, and Carney’s deeply intimate awareness of America gives him the ability to exploit Trump’s obvious weaknesses: a thin skin, hubris, impulse control, arrogance
Plan beats no plan is a truism of all crisis management, an acknowledgement that any executive, sports coach, or sentient human being understands. If you want to shape events and succeed, do the work to anticipate and understand what lies ahead so you don’t live in a state of constant surprise, chaos, and disarray. Planning is also the ultimate expression of Carney’s life force, the guiding principle of his meticulously accumulated achievements and triumphs. While Trump, like so many fools throughout time, doesn’t read or listen to contrary opinions or care to prepare, trusting his gut and native intelligence, Carney is a careful student of power dynamics and the deep lessons of history. Control what you can control, Carney explains to Canadians as he describes the need to diversify and de-risk the relationship with a declining United States. Europe might seem distant geographically, but Russia’s attack on Ukraine and self-inflicted withdrawal of its resources from Europe present an opportunity for a resource-rich nation like Canada. Membership of the European Union seems fanciful now, perhaps, but there is no question that Canadian distrust of America is hardening into real anger and dismay. The same logic applies to the countless opportunities in Asia, with Carney traveling the world signing new free trade agreements as Canada pursues a strategy to end its dependence on the undependable Americans. There is also no turning back the clock as Canada duly notes how few friends it really has in the political and media classes of the United States.
Given Trump’s use of Manhattan real estate brute force strong-arm tactics, imagine Carney’s eyes lighting up when he realized that American negotiators were attempting to attack the French-speaking peoples of Canada and the entire notion of a national culture. There was obviously no way the Canadian people were going to accept such humiliation and subjugation at the hands of an amoral gangster. As Trump’s designated thug Howard Lutnick piled on the bad faith, last-minute demands, it became evident that Carney had no choice but to walk away — despite the awful short term pain America could inflict.
Thus Carney’s plan has been put in action, with the backing of a nation unified in outrage at America’s belligerence. Trump can harm Canada, but that street runs two ways. By standing up to Trump, Carney has lured him on to the economic battlefield at the precise moment when his presidency is collapsing, with the calamitous midterm elections looming. Tight races are being run in many states that are heavily dependent on trade with Canada — Ohio, Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Alaska — the exact jurisdictions Canada will target with long-planned tariffs aimed at specific economically sensitive economic sectors, in order to increase the pressure on the ill-prepared president.
Apart from cheap shots and idiotic put downs, Trump has no history of seeking compromise and no real plan in response, as usual, apart from lashing out like a cornered animal. Trump also has vanishingly little popular support in America for his personal grudge match with Canada, an obsession that looks weirder with each passing insult. The struggling North American car industry has been jerked around by Trump’s vengeful destruction of the electric vehicle, losing billions in the process. and taxes described as tariffs will make life even more unaffordable for working American consumers. Uncertainty and unpredictability are lethal to any investment strategy, as actual business people and union leaders understand. Across the rust-belt industries Trump proclaims he is protecting, his tariff-taxes are disrupting and distorting markets and driving up costs for no purpose other than his insistence on harming America’s neighbor and ally, an enemy only in the president’s fevered imagination.
But to what end? It’s a question with no sensible answer.
Many Americans like to think foreigners draw a distinction between Donald Trump and themselves. But this self-serving piece of evasion is rapidly disappearing for Canadians, as the United States wages a war of aggression to impoverish a friendly nation, and heedlessly attack its history and sense of place and purpose. When Trump threatens the Canadian dollar, implicitly saying that he will do all he can to make the country economically uncompetitive, the statement is front page news in Canada, while it barely rates a mention in the American press. The American politicians who register tepid defenses of Canada are remarkable not so much for standing up for their neighbor or the rule of law, but for how few and far between they are — and how feckless.
As the trade war escalates this week — or evaporates into another TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) — the damage done to America’s reputation will be lasting. Once American arrogance is seen in broad daylight, it suddenly is everywhere, in Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant likening Canada to a “yipping dog,” or in former President Barack Obama distractedly turning up to a speaking engagement in Toronto carrying his cardboard coffee cup as if he can’t wait to collect his fee and return to Chicago to gaze admiringly at the shrine he has built to himself.
Damnatio Memoriae is the Latin term for the ancient Roman ritualistic destruction of all memorials to a tyrant, a kind of reverse branding deal with posterity that Trump is furiously trying to counteract with his White House bunker and ballroom and sad sack victory arch that memorializes no victory — structures very likely to be torn down or repurposed when Trump’s presidency expires.
With a mid-term election tsunami gathering force, Trump has already become a lame duck in the eyes of the world, albeit a particularly dangerous one facing richly deserved corruption investigations and possible impeachment. But the damage to the nation’s brand as ugly Americans and wannabe neocolonialist hegemon will be impossible to erase. As the trade conflict intensifies and Canada retaliates in a measured defensive way, taxing golf clubs to counter Trump’s childish hockey stick impost, Trump’s impulsive provocations will only reveal his inability to formulate anything like the concept of a winning strategy. When reality descends and he leaves office or is forced to finally end his mindless war and inevitably declare himself the winner, as his fragile manhood requires, Trump will further diminish himself and his country in the eyes of the world. Under Trump, America risks ending up like the president: alone, lost, friendless.
Despite Trump’s flailing efforts at waging a mutually destructive internecine war, foreign investment is growing in Canada, with a summit taking place this month for investors representing a trillion dollars to extol the virtues in backing a reliable, trustworthy country governed by the rule of law. Holding Canada’s main weapons in reserve, in accordance with Carney’s disciplined plan, if necessary Canadians can fight back with damaging export taxes on oil, gas, electricity, potash for America’s farmers — truly damaging countermeasures that will be employed only as a last resort. But Canada is already showing the world that it is possible to defy Trump, even when the country has so much to lose. Bullies like Trump can’t survive defiance because it reveals their true nature. In that sense, Mark Carney has become the new leader of the free world, fighting on behalf of nations too afraid to confront the American despot. As a result, incredibly, under Carney’s leadership Canada is becoming a kind of law-abiding underdog badass outlaw nation, in its understated but determined way — a reality I could palpably sense when I was in London in recent days and my 15-year-old English cousin expressed awe at my homeland’s willingness to stare down the bully-boy president.
“I would kill to be a Canadian,” he said.