Jeff Daniels stopped by MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” with Nicole Wallace to share a protest song he wrote following the national No Kings rallies against the Trump administration. Daniels shared his song in response to a comment by legendary musician Joan Baez, who said during a podcast with Wallace that one difference between the protests of the 1960s and today was that “we had the music.”
Daniels, a vocal critic of Donald Trump’s, sang and played the song on acoustic guitar for just over three uninterrupted minutes on MSNBC. He introduced the piece as “Crazy World” — a song he wrote himself. Daniels said the song is “How I cope.”
“This crazy world’s gone crazy,” Daniels sings in the chorus. “Who am I to judge? It’s nice to know, in a world full of hate, there’s someone out there still making love.”
“We needed that. We all needed that,” Wallace laughed after the song before asking Daniels to return to the show with another song. You can watch the full clip below.
Daniels appeared on MSNBC to talk about the No Kings protest and, more broadly, issues people are facing under Trump’s America. He specifically pointed to an AI video Trump shared in response to the protests, depicting him as a king “spewing excrement” on the people gathered, as a point of division.
“Would Lincoln have done that?” Daniels asked. “Kennedy?”
“I don’t think Nixon would’ve done that,” Wallace responded.
“Nixon wouldn’t have done it! Reagan wouldn’t have done it! Bush wouldn’t have done it, either Bush,” Daniels said. “You know, I just, I think people in the Midwest, where I am, still have this, we value our decency and our civility and we don’t get taken with whatever goes on on the coasts, you know? We’ve got a chip on our shoulder about that, and I think it matters. It may not matter right away when you’re voting, but if he doesn’t deliver on the economy like he promised he would, then that stuff will start to add up, and they’ll get tired of it, and they’ll vote for change, which is what they always do.”
The video speaks to a broader concern of Daniels’, which is the sheer amount of change and news under the Trump administration. The actor, who starred in Aaron Sorkin’s media-set drama “The Newsroom,” once noted that the show simply “couldn’t keep up” with a political landscape like this one.
“We’re always months and months behind,” Daniels told the New York Post in 2024 of the show’s production process. “Then, by the time it airs, it’s even further behind. So now Trump gets elected and there’s something every 15 minutes. I don’t think we could have kept up.”
You can watch Daniels’ full MSNBC interview below.
