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
Sunsara Taylor (right, with Michelle Xai) is a leader and co-founder of Refuse Fascism.Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Bob Avakian (pictured in 2014), who founded the Revolutionary Communist Party, has ties to Refuse Racism.Courtesy of The Bob Avakian Institute
Members of the Revolutionary Communist Party march from the South End to Boston Common during May Day in Boston, May 1, 1980.Tom Landers/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Activists with RevComs held the protest near MacArthur Park in December 2024 ahead of President-elect Trump’s planned wave of migrant deportations.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Refuse Fascism protestors hold a rally around the Washington Monument on November 5, 2025.Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images
We Are Witnessing the Imperial Presidency on Steroids
During the last period of his time as president, while the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn’t hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn’t even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?
The question of what in our system could have prevented Nixon from causing a nuclear holocaust if he wanted to has been left unanswered. There have been rumors that Cabinet secretaries at the time were telling aides to ignore such a presidential order if it were issued, but that’s a stop-gap measure, not a constitutional check. The designers of our republican system never intended their chief executive to have this sort of authority. The fact that presidents do today is the root cause of many of our national problems.
Americans are living though a historic moment right now, one that would be fascinating to watch were it not so insanely important. There is a disaster looming that is becoming more clear every day. The cause is that the office of the president of the United States has far too much power and very few constraints. This combination invites authoritarianism. All it needs to become manifest is someone in the White House who desires such an outcome. It seems we have someone like that now.
While it’s both tempting and normal to see current conditions as the result of recent events, the 21st-century American political situation is the culmination of decades of trends involving the ever-increasing power of the presidency. None of this is hidden, and scholars have been writing about it for decades (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s famous book The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973). And while the aggregation of presidential power is often cloaked in rationales and justifications, from anti-communism to anti-drugs, war powers, anti-terrorism, et cetera, sometimes it’s simply how things developed and evolved (the nature and challenges associated with nuclear weapons is an example). But there is no denying at this point that we have created a systemic monster that the constitutional framers wouldn’t recognize — and one they would fear. The founders believed in diffused power and oversight. They believed in a strong and active legislative branch to counter autocratic mission creep. We have none of those things at the moment. Are any of them recoverable? Is constitutional erosion a one-way street, or can it be reversed with some sort of renaissance? Must we go the way of Rome’s Republic?
To rebalance our constitutional portfolio first requires us to want a less powerful executive. This is somewhat counterintuitive. Americans are accustomed to electing leaders who promise to push for outcomes, foster positive change, fix things, and help people. The voters expect the president to use the power of the office to achieve what the people want. The pressure from the winning candidate’s supporters is not to restrain power but to use as much of it as possible. We are addicted to the exercise of presidential authority as long as it is being used for ends we desire. The effect this has on the system as a whole is given little attention. Is it even conceivable that we might push for leaders to restrain or roll back whatever power they might claim in order to prevent us from getting a president with too much authority? What if that’s the only way to repair things?
If we come out of this current inflection point constitutionally intact — and that’s far from guaranteed — we should use any pendulum-swinging momentum for reform the way legislators used the Watergate scandal aftermath to try to rein in the runaway powers of the presidency. There were lots of hearings, investigations, and legal alterations done in the mid-1970s to “fix” things, along with punishments meted out to those in government who knowingly went too far. This seems healthy for any system when its constitutional flaws are exposed. But like a noxious weed, the growth of executive power returned with a vengeance starting in the 1980s. Many of the post-Watergate reforms were challenged, overruled, or functionally eviscerated. The rationale given was that the “legitimate” powers of the presidency had been encroached upon. The formerly fringe concept of the Unitary Executive Theory emerged as a justification for unilateral actions and presidential power consolidation, pushed by think tanks (and the Supreme Court justices they pushed for) and entities who wanted less interference from other branches of government. This is the same rationale Donald Trump and his surrogates cite continually.
Any effort to dial back presidential authority faces strong headwinds in our current political climate. The Supreme Court seems hell-bent on ceding ever more power to the president, one who has far more power now than the “imperial” Nixon did back in the early 1970s. The electorate has demonstrated that it’s willing to support chief executives pushing constitutional boundaries if it’s done for reasons voters favor. And neither party wants to unilaterally disarm by ceding authority if the other side can’t be trusted to do the same. Any salvation coming from the legislative branch seems hopeless. This dynamic is decades in the making; Congress has grown weak, venal, co-opted, and seems happy to relinquish its power to avoid responsibility for anything that might hurt members’ reelections. Frustration with Congress leads to even more temptation to use presidents to achieve political goals — often using executive orders — that lawmakers seem unable or unwilling to pursue. The dynamic isn’t favorable.
But we have been given another reminder of why any of those good reasons for increasing the power of one human being at the expense of the rest of the government aren’t good enough. The executive branch is the one overwhelmingly likely to bring us to a dictatorship, and we can now see how much the vast powers of the office have only been held in check by mere protocol. A president unleashed shows us the power of the modern office uncloaked. And it should scare us all back into the mindset of Ben Franklin when he said that we had “a republic, if you can keep it.” Congress, with its many members, isn’t likely to be the branch that takes democracy away from us. The danger comes from the executive branch where one person calls the shots. And as it was when Nixon fell, we are being reminded that increasingly powerful presidents are something the system seems to germinate naturally. We need to periodically prune back the executive’s powers when the opportunity presents itself. That time must be soon. The weeds have overrun the garden.
Too many forget that the primary goal of the U.S. constitutional design wasn’t efficient governing. It was tyrant prevention. We put up with all sorts of impediments to change, reform, and improvement for that one simple goal. Whether this firewall still works is the paramount political question of our age. Will this era turn out to be a blip on the timeline? A warning that prompts reflection, reform, and recalibration akin to the McCarthyistic “Red Scare” era? Or will it be a Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment that forever ends the American experiment?
The more scary aspect of all this is the degree of public support for an uber-powerful leader who champions their views and pushes for what they desire. Often these wishes are unachievable because our constitutional protections stand in the way. This is a problem that will outlive the current president and requires deep national introspection. We could start by reminding ourselves what happens when representative systems go sideways. The outcomes are not recalled fondly by those who lived through them. Better to acquire that lesson from some other nation’s tragedy rather than having to learn about the danger of historical hot stoves by touching one ourselves.
We are currently seeing what can happen when the only branch controlled by a single individual decides it wants to flex its vast and awesome powers. It demonstrates to all reasonable people that it’s too much power for one person to have. Imagining such authority in the hands of one’s worst enemy should be enough to make this concern clear to anyone. The president can pick up the phone and order the deaths of billions and the ruination of the planet’s ecosystem. That’s clearly too much power for any human being, isn’t it?