Kid Rock Brings RNC Crowd to its Feet With His Hit 'American Bad ...

19 Jul 2024

Newsweek

Kid Rock Brings RNC Crowd to its Feet With His Hit American Bad

The musician took stage to honor the Republican 2024 presidential nominee.

Kid Rock brought the raucous crowd at the Republican National Convention to its feet on Thursday and had them chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" for former President and Republican 2024 presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The singer and rapper performed his 2000 hit American Bad Ass with a few revisions to the lyrics to retrofit to the election. He had the audience shouting "Trump! Trump! Trump!" replacing the original lyrics "Hey! Hey! Hey!"

Kid Rock also named important presidential election battle grounds like Pennsylvania and Arizona, instead of other locations in the original version of the song.

"Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for the most patriotic, bad ass on earth, President Donald J. Trump," Kid Rock told the crowd before he left the stage and introduced Dana White.

The right-wing musician described Trump as one of his "besties" in an interview with Rolling Stone in May.

Kid Rock reacted to the assassination attempt on the former president at the rally in Butler over the weekend.

"You f**k with Trump, you f**k with me," he shouted in a shirtless selfie video.

Minutes into Donald Trump's speech at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, loud popping noises were heard as people huddled for safety. Trump appeared to clutch his ear and fell to the ground. When he stood back up, surrounded by Secret Service agents, as blood was seen running down his face.

"We came millimeters away from one of the darkest moments in our nation's history," Trump Jr. said at the RNC on Night 3. "My father's instant was...not to coward, not to surrender but to show for all the world to see that the next American president has the heart of a lion."

The shooting is officially being investigated as an attempted assassination. A poster with imagery of the shooter, Thomas Crooks, was seen outside of the RNC in Milwaukee on Wednesday.

Over the past decade, Kid Rock has grown increasingly polarizing. He's engulfed himself in all things Trump, taking to interviews to predict Trump's electoral victor, discuss "DEI crap" and all things MAGA.

Kid Rock, whose birth name is Robert Richie, has started to make his concerts resemble Trump rallies. He has put Trump on a giant screen, telling his audience "This is your president now, so deal with it!" according to one of his peers.

Kid Rock has said in the past that he knew it would be risky to publicly support Trump.

"When I doubled down on it, I knew that could be a career ender," he said in the Rolling Stone interview. "But I was betting that there were a lot of like-minded people out there."

Follow Newsweek's coverage of the RNC Day 4 here.

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