Trump Just Landed Himself More Musical Legal Trouble

“Gimmie! Gimmie! Gimmie!”

Swedish pop supergroup ABBA are torching Donald Trump for using their music without permission during a campaign event in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on Tuesday, demanding that the Republican presidential candidate’s campaign pull any footage of the rally that featured their songs.

Trump reportedly played several of ABBA’s greatest hits, including “Money, Money, Money”, “The Winner Takes It All”, and “Dancing Queen.” The event, which was geared toward a heavy Swedish demographic, also reportedly played a 10-minute clip of ABBA’s live performances, reported AFP.

The Swedes’ record company, Universal Music, told The Guardian that the campaign had not asked for permission to use the tracks and that footage from the event must be “immediately” taken down and removed.

“Together with the members of Abba, we have discovered that videos have been released where Abba’s music/videos has been used at Trump events, and we have therefore requested that such use be immediately taken down and removed,” a Universal spokesperson told The Guardian. “Universal Music Publishing AB and Polar Music International AB have not received any request, so no permission or license has been given to Trump.”

ABBA member Björn Ulvaeus told Swedish newswire TT that Universal would “[make] sure it is taken down.”

ABBA is far from the only musical group that’s gone after Trump for using their music to advance his campaign without their permission. In August alone, Trump has drawn fury from the Isaac Hayes estate, Celine Dion, and Beyoncé for the unauthorized use of their music during campaign events and advertisements.

But the roster of artists who have outright banned Trump from using their music is long and wide. They include Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, the Village People, and Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler.

It turns out the fight between Donald Trump’s campaign staff and an Arlington National Cemetery official Monday was worse than we thought. The assaulted cemetery employee was a woman, and she didn’t want to press charges because she was afraid of retaliation from Trump supporters.

The New York Times reports that the woman filed an incident report with the military, but opted not to proceed further with law enforcement authorities at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Virginia, which has jurisdiction over the cemetery. Trump and his campaign have been scrambling to explain away the physical altercation, posting a message of thanks from a military family, blaming the cemetery official, and even accusing her of having a “mental health episode.”

Taking photographs or video at a military cemetery for political purposes is prohibited under federal law, particularly in Arlington National Cemetery’s Section 60, where recent military casualties are buried. After participating in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns on the third anniversary of the Abbey Gate attack in Afghanistan, Trump visited Section 60 with family members of Marines killed in the attack—and with cameras. The cemetery official tried to stop Trump’s campaign staffers from filming and taking photos, leading to them pushing the official and calling her names.

It turns out that the official’s concern was warranted, after Trump released photos and a video of his visit to Section 60, which was supposed to be private and closed to the press. The family of Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, whose gravesite was shown in those photos, issued a statement saying that they did not give permission for the grave to be filmed or used by the Trump campaign.

“[A]ccording to our conversation with Arlington National Cemetery, the Trump campaign staffers did not adhere to the rules that were set in place for this visit to Staff Sergeant Hoover’s gravesite in Section 60, which lays directly next to my brother’s grave,” said Marckesano’s sister Michele in the statement. 

“We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly,” she added.

One politician who was with Trump at the cemetery on Monday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, apologized on X (formerly Twitter) for using photos from the section in a campaign email.

“This was not a campaign event and was never intended to be used by the campaign,” Cox wrote. “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent. My campaign will be sending out an apology.”

The Trump campaign, however, has not. Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance accused the media of blowing it out of proportion.

“Apparently somebody at Arlington Cemetery, some staff member had a little disagreement with somebody,” Vance said. “And they have turned — the media has turned this into a national news story.”

The more the Trump campaign refuses to acknowledge even the appearance of disrespect at a military cemetery, as well as the possible violation of federal law, the more likely the incident won’t go away, especially given Trump’s dismal reputation with military veterans. 

Donald Trump’s polling in Sun Belt states should have the former president shaking in his boots, according to one political analyst.

Fox News released polling Wednesday from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina, which found that Kamala Harris had significantly tightened the gap across the key states. Harris is now leading Trump by one point in Arizona, and two points in Georgia and Nevada. Trump has maintained a one-point lead in North Carolina, where the race is now considered to be a toss-up.

The polling indicates that Harris has expanded the Democratic voting map since entering the race, putting the Sun Belt states back in play for potential Democratic victories. President Joe Biden previously trailed Trump in each of these states.

During an appearance on CNN Wednesday night, political analyst Astead Herndon said that the Trump team ought to be scared by these numbers.

“This should be an alarming fact for the Trump campaign, and I think the trend line has been so consistent, if they are not alarmed there’s probably something wrong there,” Herndon said.

“Because Donald Trump has campaigned the last month—has been flailing, has not found a consistent attack against Harris, has not found a way to break through a news cycle, and has spent his time bringing [in] RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, people who don’t expand his tent to the voters he’s bleeding by this moment,” Herndon said, noting that Trump had failed to grow his vote share, in comparison to Harris.

Herndon noted that the poll results showed the impact of the massive small dollar donations Harris has received since joining the race, which allow her to defend her blue territories while also expanding into regions such as the Sun Belt states. With Biden as the candidate, that region might’ve been a lost cause.

“It’s Donald Trump now that is under both the political and financial pressure—again, most of which is of his own making—to be able not to have the ground game that he should at this point,” Herndon said.

But if Team Trump is panicking, they’re dealing with it their usual way: denial.

The Trump campaign promptly issued their own corrections for the Fox News polls, claiming the news organization has an “awful track record” when it comes to taking accurate polls.

“It’s that time of year again: Fox is releasing atrocious polling,” the statement said.

The campaign published their own “unskewed” results, which had been adjusted based on the differences between Fox’s projected margins in those states in 2020, and their final margins after Election Day. According to the Trump campaign’s math, Trump is miraculously ahead in Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina.

The Trump campaign has repeatedly disseminated “unskewed” polls adjusted based on the difference between election results and recalled votes of respondents, or how they claim to have voted four years ago—a metric that is widely considered to be unreliable.

Earlier this month, the Trump campaign attempted to do the same thing to warp New York Times/Siena polling from the Sun Belt states that found Harris was leading Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent. The poll also found that Harris had passed Trump in North Carolina, leading him 49 percent to 47 percent, and that she had significantly narrowed the former president’s lead in Georgia and Nevada.

With Harris’s newfound edge, it seems that Trump should spend less time cooking the books, and more time getting his ground game together.

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance doesn’t seem to know what the other half of his ticket is up to.

Speaking before a crowd in the battleground state of Wisconsin for a fourth time Wednesday night, the Republican vice presidential pick attempted, once again, to brush off Donald Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery debacle. According to Vance, Trump was wrongly booted from the military burial ground, since it wasn’t as if he was filming a “TV commercial at a gravesite.”

Except that’s exactly what Trump was doing.

“You’re acting like Donald Trump filmed a TV commercial at a gravesite,” Vance said to “the media.” “He was there providing emotional support to a lot of brave Americans who lost loved ones they never should have lost, and there happened to be a camera there, and someone gave them permission to have that camera there.”

Trump utilized the footage for a campaign video where he can be seen laying flowers down at a grave and taking photos with people while giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

Trump was caught in the act on Tuesday while filming the stunt in Section 60 of the cemetery, where recent military casualties are buried. Campaign staffers reportedly launched into a verbal and physical fight with cemetery officials, who had asked the campaign to stop videotaping. Federal law prohibits politically related activities in the cemetery, including taking photos and videos in support of a political campaign. And just because the families there gave permission doesn’t change that.

The Arlington Cemetery official that confronted the campaign filed a report over the felonious behavior but declined to press charges, reportedly fearing possible retaliation from Trump’s rabid supporters, according to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman.

Now that Kamala Harris has agreed to sit down for her first interview since President Biden dropped out of the race in July, Republicans are suddenly claiming she’s not doing it right.

Harris is sitting down for a joint interview with her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, that will air at 9 p.m. Thursday on CNN. Republicans are trying to use the joint interview to claim that Harris is running scared and can’t talk to the press on her own.

“Her handlers don’t even trust her to survive a softball CNN interview, so Coach Walz is going to chaperone,” said Jesse Watters on Fox News.

“They know Kamala Harris can’t get through an interview all by herself,” Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders similarly told Fox & Friends on Wednesday. “It’s clear that her own team and her own party thinks she needs a babysitter.”

“Tim is there to help prop her up and if it gets awkward or she starts giggling or looking … crazy, then he’s gonna interrupt and take over. And then they’re gonna go back and stop the tape and retape that question to make sure she looks fantastic,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, best known for murdering her puppy, parroted on Newsmax.

There’s just one very giant problem with their argument: Joint interviews are hardly out of the ordinary. In fact, it’s customary for the presidential and vice presidential nominees to be interviewed together immediately following the convention. Even Trump did it himself.

Though it is notable that Harris has not yet taken an interview, saying Walz is “chaperoning” her or “babysitting” her is weird and misogynistic. After watching Harris at the Democratic National Convention, claiming that she is incapable of sitting down for an interview without a man by her side doesn’t make sense. The line of attack seems like a holdover from Republicans’ attacks on Joe Biden. But on Harris, it just doesn’t play.