On a recent episode of Steve-O’s ‘Wild Ride!’ podcast, Dee Snider recalled a phone call with Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, where he asked him to stop using ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ at his rallies.
Snider let Trump use the song for his campaign events before finding out about his political stance. Despite suggestions from his family to denounce the former president’s use of the track, he decided to ‘give Trump the respect he showed me’ by asking for permission at the beginning:
“And I’m gonna pick up a phone. I’m gonna say, ‘Listen, I need you to stop using the song. We’re not on the same page.’ And so I did. We’re not on the same page, and we don’t see eye-to-eye. And to his credit, he said, ‘Okay.’ He stopped using it that night. He never used it again. And he knows he could use it. And I called him back and said, ‘Hey, are we cool?’ And he said, ‘Dee, we’ve done so much charity work together.’ And we had — many things. And he goes, ‘Of course we’re cool.'”
Politics’ Effect On The Two’s Friendship
According to Snider’s words, he and Trump were friends before the latter’s presidential run, collaborating on various charity projects for children’s cancer and more. Still, as he went on to say in the interview, the Twisted Sister vocalist was:
“Anti-Trump, what he stands for. I believe he’s a salesman, and he’s looking for someone to buy his product, and the people he found who bought his product were people I don’t agree with.”
The Use Of The Song By ‘Oppressors’
The use of ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ went beyond Trump’s campaign. The 2012 Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, and some groups of anti-maskers during the COVID-19 pandemic also played the song to support their ideas at different times.
Following these attempts, Snider took to X to make his stance on the song’s use clear by writing:
“Attention: I wrote ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ to lift up the downtrodden. Not inspire the oppressors. Fuck anyone who cares only about what they want and not the greater good. ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ is not your song. It never was, and it never will be!”
Watch Dee Snider’s interview with Steve-O in the video below.
