How “YMCA” became Donald Trump’s unlikely theme song

The Republican campaign’s embrace of the gay anthem shows just how much the party has been changed.

Donald Trump, more than any living politician, knows how to create a moment. The photo of the now president-elect – defiantly punching the air against an azure sky and an askew American flag, blood dripping from his ear just moments after being shot in July – is a visual metaphor from Adam Curtis’s wildest fantasies. He hangs out of the window of a rubbish truck with an orange safety vest over his shirt and tie; he serves French fries in McDonald’s and looks like the subject of a Normal Rockwell painting. For all her qualities (there are some) Kamala Harris never had the aesthetic instincts of her rival.

The acme of the form, however, came in January 2021 at the curtain call of Trump’s first presidency. As he climbed the stairs of Air Force One alongside First Lady Melania, ready to fly home to Florida – and into the political wilderness – ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration, the unusually doleful president turned around and waved as “YMCA” by the Village People blared incongruously in the background. Never has the song’s melancholy been drawn out so acutely: “Young man! There’s no need to feel down…”

Trump hadn’t been dancing to the song long before it became the obvious soundtrack to his politics. He has a few go-to records; an evident fondness for “Memories” from the musical Cats; the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was his 2016 backing track; “Nothing Compares U” by Sinead O’Connor crops up here and there. But “YMCA” – with its defiantly camp orchestral arrangement, brass riff that echoes in the conscience hours after the song has stopped – has become the ultimate anthem of the Maga sensibility.

In early October 2020, close to polling day in the middle of a pandemic that was immiserating the globe, Trump was hospitalised with Covid-19. The US was thrust into the unsettling position of having an incapacitated leader, as Britain experienced with Boris Johnson in April that same year. Trump was lagging in the polls against Biden, too. He needed to prove his vim after recovering from a disease that was, at the time, killing men of his age and constitution.

And so, when he returned to the public stage in Florida a week later, he closed out proceedings by dancing to “YMCA” for the first time: pumping his arms back and forth to the song’s choreography, somehow both loose and wooden – snakey and robotic – at the same time. The gay anthem and its accompanying moves became a centrepiece of his persona, counterintuitive proof of his manliness.

The 1978 song “YMCA” is only sort of about the Young Men’s Christian Association – a British organisation that provided men with accommodation and various athletic activities. The YMCA was founded on the principles of Muscular Christianity – a movement interested in patriotism, discipline, and physical beauty. The Village People, of course, were referencing YMCA hostels and their popular reputation as cruising sites. “YMCA, the gay national anthem,” Trump tells some podcast hosts incredulously in 2022. “Did you ever hear that? They call it ‘the gay national anthem’.”

That Trump has no compunction about taking the GOP to the gay discotheque reveals just how far the party is transformed from its once-entrenched social conservatism. The priggishness of yore – emerging from a coalition of ultra-conservative Catholics and evangelical protestants – has been laundered from the movement in favour of a kind of winking loucheness. The song has become a light symbol of this deeper shift, a realignment in a GOP whose old agenda – “futile regime-change wars, entitlement cuts” – had “effectively rendered it deeply unpopular”, as my colleague Sohrab Ahmari wrote in our pre-election cover story on 1 November. The party of the Village People is not the party of Dick Cheney.

For all its vulgar language, felonry and cynicism, the politics of joy is a huge part of Maga. Whether it’s Trump hanging through a drive-thru window, dancing on stage or driving a garbage truck, this exuberance has clearly resonated more with voters than the worthy moral hectoring of the Democrats. Trump’s pop soundtrack now seems a more potent political force than an endorsement from Beyoncé (which perhaps actively harmed the Harris campaign).

This, it seems, is precisely why “YMCA” works so well. Not just because it is evidence of a party that has unshackled itself from social mores no longer relatable to the public; nor even because it showed up the Democrats’ focus-grouped cultural offering. But because Trump does really seem to like the music. “What’s the most popular thing in the world?” Ali G – Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical rapper persona – asked Trump, then the host of The Apprentice, in 2003. “Music,” he responded earnestly, without skipping a beat.

Dancing to “YMCA”, Trump’s many contradictions come to life. He fashions himself as a muscular strongman, but clearly has the disposition of a sentimentalist. He is more extreme, and more liberal, than his predecessors. He is more fun and a lot more menacing than his competition. He’s a rhetorician whose incoherence is his biggest strength; an anti-elite American patrician; and the only politician, perhaps, who could capture the soul of the GOP and turn it inside out – one dance move at a time.

[See also: Postliberalism redux]