Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released approximately seventy bajillion pages of interview transcripts, emails, text messages, memos, bank records, and various other exhibits related to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer promising compromising information about Hillary Clinton that never seemed to materialize. The documents are long and boring and provide little in the way of definitive answers as to whether the Trump campaign successfully colluded with the Russians to sway the 2016 election, — or whether Donald Trump and his associates are simply just corrupt goons who make everything they touch seem sketchy. In short, I wish I had not spent five hours of my day going through them, but alas, here we are.
However, tucked into a 375-page interview with Rob Goldstone, the British music publicist who set up the meeting between the Trump campaign and Veselnitskaya at the request of the his client, the Russian pop singer Emin Agalarov, and his oligarch father Aras Agalarov, is the most succinct, bizarre display of Donald Trump’s love of his own name I have ever encountered. While explaining that the last time he saw Donald Trump in person was in May of 2015, Goldstone offered the following:
Keep in mind that while Goldstone was not under oath, it is still a crime to lie to Congress.
I think we’re all asking the same question here, and that question is, “Which rap song was Donald Trump listening to?” Now, there are several rap songs that have “Donald Trump” in their titles. There is “Trump Change”, a 1998 cut off of E-40’s Hall of Game, but I severely doubt that anyone who knows Donald Trump is cool enough to put him onto late-90s E-40. There is Rae Sremmurd’s “Up Like Trump,” which appeared on their January 2015 debut SremmLife, but given that it wasn’t released as a single it seems unlikely. And while it’s really fun to envision Donald Trump listening to YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “Fuck Donald Trump” and not realizing the song is about how much the Los Angeles rappers hate him, that song didn’t come out until 2016, so it’s not that one either. The only possibility, then, is Mac Miller’s “Donald Trump,” which Trump himself publicly praised. (Miller, in recent years, has clarified that he’s opposed to trump politically.)
Though the song’s lyrics are relatively tame, it still contains lines like, “Find a big butt bitch somewhere, get my nuts kissed,” which, while Trump might feel differently, is not the sort of thing most people want to hear in a rap song based around their name. Goldstone claims he “cautioned” Trump to “perhaps look at the words to the song before he enjoyed it so much,” it seems that Trump didn’t heed his warning. Just two months later, in July of 2015, Trump played essentially the same trick in an interview with The Hill, ordering an aide to play “Donald Trump” on YouTube and then remarking on how many views the song’s music video had racked up. The Hill story ends like this:
“By the way, great song,” Trump said with a wink and a finger point.
As the song kept playing, the lyrics turned more vulgar.
Trump quickly added, “I wouldn’t say it’s entirely good for the women or the women of Iowa.”
Via Twitter Direct Message, I reached out to Mac Miller for a response regarding this matter, but did not hear back.
