Elon Musk mocks Green Day’s ‘MAGA agenda’ slam of Donald Trump

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Elon Musk has dismissed Green Day’s dig at Donald Trump during their appearance Sunday night on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

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As the punk trio thrashed their way through 2004’s American Idiot, which was originally written to protest then-U.S. president George W. Bush and the Iraq War, singer Billie Joe Armstrong took a swipe at Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan by swapping the lyric “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” for “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda” while performing live.

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As the line swap went viral, the Tesla CEO and owner of the social-media site X accused the band of following a corporate political agenda.

“Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it,” Musk wrote, adding laughing emojis.

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The change enraged Trump fans, who took to social media to try to cancel the San Francisco rockers as they trended on X.

“Green Day is now Green Done. Don’t they understand it’s no longer Hollywood Cool with the rest of us to take potshots at DJT? We the people are speaking!” wrote one person on Trump’s Truth Social platform.

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Far-right activist Laura Loomer shared a clip of the performance with her 747,400 followers on X and dismissed the band as “losers.”

“Green Day is a woke joke,” a third person declared, while others blasted the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, calling them “has-beens, “washed up” and “sellouts.”

With Trump the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party in this year’s coming election, one critic predicted Armstrong’s slam was just the start of an orchestrated campaign against the businessman.

“This is the B team,” they wrote about Green Day’s lyric change. “Wait till they break out Taylor Swift.”

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But plenty of Green Day fans backed the band, with one writing, “To the b—-es b—-ing: Green Day was never on your side. American Idiot came out in 2004, who was president then? EXACTLY. That album was a middle finger to Dubya … you were just too stupid to realize it.”

The change wasn’t the first time the band has taken a swipe at the former president.

During the American Music Awards in November 2016, Armstrong chanted “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!” during a rendition of Bang Bang. Earlier that same month, Armstrong altered lyrics in American Idiot as he sang, “Can you hear the sounds of hysteria? The subliminal Trump America.”

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The summer before the 2016 election, Armstrong compared Trump to Hitler in an interview with Kerrang.

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“The worst problem I see about Trump is who his followers are,” he told the outlet (per Entertainment Weekly). “I actually feel bad for them because they’re poor, working-class people who can’t get a leg up. They’re pissed off and he’s preyed on their anger … He just said, ‘You have no options and I’m the only one and I’m going to take care of it myself.’ I mean, that’s f—ing Hitler, man! … I don’t even know how else to explain it. Wish I were over-exaggerating. And sometimes maybe I do over-exaggerate with Bush. But with Trump, I just can’t wait ’til he’s gone.”

At a small concert in southern France in 2018, Armstrong went further, likening Trump to “acid gone bad.”

“I f—ing hate Donald Trump so much,” he told the crowd. “I used to scream I hated George Bush. This one is a little different. This one is bad, it’s like acid gone bad. F—ing LSD and the American right, man.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com

X: @markhdaniell

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