Let Me Get What I Want
How the Smiths became the perfect soundtrack to Trump's 2024 campaign.
During my late teens and early twenties, I worked at Starbucks. My cohort at the coffee shop chain turned one-stop-breakfast-shop was comprised of undergrad and postgraduate students, nondenominational evangelists, and aspiring country music songwriters.
I was none of those.
Sharing in my relative uniqueness was the dyed redhead with the best worst attitude I’ve ever met. She had an undercut, a septum piercing that she pushed up her nose during work hours, and a boyfriend who played bass in a local punk band. She was always ‘going back to school’ and loved her rescued pit bulls. Don’t bully her breed.
We commiserated through holiday shifts, product shortages, and working late for the cranky crowds on Christmas. She was a hard worker and had the accent of an authentic Southerner. She wore Doc Martens, never shaved her legs during the winter, and had a tattoo of Morrissey. This, as far as I was concerned, was the archetypal fan of The Smiths.
If you’d told me then, it would have been incomprehensible that Morrissey’s crooning would be a regular feature of 2024 Donald Trump rallies. How could a group of constituents, seemingly so dissonant from the band’s ardent followers, be championing the same message? At first, I thought that it must have been an ironic sound technician playing a tongue-in-cheek joke on the rally-goers, but as more videos surfaced and a trend emerged, I realized that the phenomenon went much deeper than I had originally estimated.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a video of a Smiths song being played for a packed crowd before a Donald Trump rally, then I saw another - this one from 2023. Then, the strange playlist was corroborated, stating that it was a regular occurrence by some who were ‘in the know’.
It’s not as if my old coworker is now the average MAGA voter, and, to my knowledge, there hasn’t been a lot of cross-pollination between these two groups. So, how did this happen?
Well, for starters, Morrissey is a right-wing bigot these days. Yes, the ‘meat is murder,’ perpetually heartbroken, crooner of love songs is now castigated by the left as ‘right-wing’ for the grave sin of believing that sex is real and that illegal immigration is bad. The threshold for being a fascist is just next to socialism, there is no intermediary position. Couple that with the online claim that The Smiths are now incel music, you can see why the left writ large are leaving their former poster boy in the lurch.
The Smiths’ music is so fantastic that it’s criminal for it not to be affixed to a cultural movement, so I don’t blame MAGAland for staking their claim on this piece of unoccupied musical realty. I don’t love the juxtaposition - neither does Johnny Marr - but I do understand it. In fact, when you explore the lyrical and thematic continuity between the two camps, the parallels between Morrissey’s self-important, much-beleaguered identity and all of American politics are striking. The Trump team was just the first to identify it.
Never has a campaign song’s lyrics been more expressive than the Smiths’ ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want.’
Haven't had a dream in a long time
See, the life I've had can make a good man bad
So, for once in my life, let me get what I want
Lord knows it would be the first time
Morrissey sings it with such melancholic sincerity that you actually start to believe him. The song’s lyrical depth is brief, and the singer never explicitly tells the listener what exactly it is that he wants. You’re left to fill in the blanks, imagining that it’s as weighty of a concept as love or happiness, etc. It can come across as a little whiney, I admit, but the loose constraints of songwriting are such that it’s wise not to attribute every line or song as autobiographical.
Politicians don’t get that pass though and they are constantly running afoul of the artists whose songs they’re seeking to borrow. Right-wing politicians and conservatives historically have the toughest time finding ideological co-travelers who aren’t white trash. Sorry Kid Rock and John Rich, I don’t make the rules.
To be fair, music and right-leaning politics don’t always go hand and hand. Sam Cooke didn’t sing ‘Little to No Change is Gonna Come’ and Neil Young’s ‘Southern Man’ wasn’t exactly a rave review of Southern bible-brandishing conservatism. How no Republican has coopted the Beatles’ ‘Taxman’ for a campaign message is beyond me.
To make matters more difficult, very frequently, it seems that they have no real comprehension of what the song is even about. Famously Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both attempted to use Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born In the U.S.A.’ during their presidential campaigns. It’s the musical equivalent of only reading the headline. But after years of misunderstanding and misappropriation, they’ve finally got one right.
It doesn’t matter that Donald Trump is a billionaire who has gotten just about everything he’s ever wanted the moment he asked for it. It’s irrelevant that he won the presidency - pretty handily I might add - in 2016. ‘Let me get what I want’ is the perfect sentiment for Donald Trump’s campaign. He and his supporters feel maligned and hard done and demand that they get what they deserve.
In this way, it shows how little disparity there is between the motivations of the two rival parties of our nation. Our politics are fueled by spite, revenge, and, perhaps most caustically, entitlement. Notably missing from the lyrics is a counterpart. There is no consideration of the fate of the number opposite the singer which only confirms that the game we’re playing is zero-sum.
Donald Trump’s campaign bucked the longstanding trend of right-wing politicians misunderstanding art made by people who despise them. The Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr has already made his displeasure evident on social media, but that does nothing to contradict the level of which Trump’s campaign is embodied by ‘Let Me Get What I Want’.
I’ve never fully understood Donald Trump’s appeal to half of the country, but this has been a watershed moment for me. The subtle admission from this campaign soundtrack is exactly what Americans think about our politics. The former president’s motivations aren’t unique in tone or aspiration, only in volume. He has no qualms with calling his opponents criminals, openly opining about taking the natural resources of foreign countries, or calling Ted Cruz’s wife a dog. He’s not the only politician that is animated in this way, he just might be the first to admit it.
This is how he’s polarized the entire country; he’s the manifestation of our most base political and cultural desires. Staring into the mirror too long makes you hate what you see, doesn’t it? He is the political id of the American citizenry.
I should make the distinction that I’m not suggesting Trump possesses the political genius to make such an incise decision regarding the way he portrays himself. Somehow he makes congruent the contradictions of his Bud-Lite patronage, poor grammar, and gold toilets. He’s just a working-class guy with more money than you can shake a stick at.
The post-Trump era, one that can’t come too soon, will be populated by any and all who dare to replicate the archetype of the American subconscious that he personified. One that is aggrieved, forlorn, and out for revenge. It remains to be seen if anyone will get what they want come November, but it’ll probably be what we all deserve.