Donald Trump told an audience in Sumterville, Florida, that his wife Melania doesn’t like when he dances to the “gay national anthem,” the Village People’s 1978 hit “YMCA,” because it’s “not presidential.”
“She hates when I danced to what sometimes referred to as the gay national anthem, you know?” Trump said. “She hates it. You know, that song was number five 32 years ago, and it went to number one 32 years later.”
The song previously hit #2 on the Hot 100 chart in the United States, and was the #1 song in several other countries in 1979. It hit #1 on Billboard’s charts after Trump used it during campaign events.
“There’s never been anything like … it never hit number one. It was number five 32 years ago, and it went to number one for months during the last months that they gave. They loved that song,” he continued. “But she goes, ‘Darling, please.’ You know, she’s a very elegant woman. She goes, ‘Darling, please, don’t dance. It’s not presidential.’ I said, ‘It may not be presidential, but I’m leading by 20 points in the polls or something.’”
In December 2024, the Village People’s singer Victor Willis explained he’s continued to let Trump use the song because he “simply didn’t have the heart to prevent his continued use of my song in the face of so many artists withdrawing his use of their material.”
“Since 2020, I’ve received over a thousand complaints about President Elect Trump’s use of Y.M.C.A. With that many complaints, I decided to ask the President Elect to stop using Y.M.C.A. because his use had become a nuisance to me,” Willis wrote on Facebook at the time. “However, the use continued because the Trump campaign knew they had obtained a political use license from BMI and absent that license being terminated, they had every right to continue using Y.M.C.A. And they did.”
He continued: “In fact, I started noticing numerous artists withdrawing the President Elect’s use of their material. But by the time I said to my wife one day, hey, ‘Trump’ seems to genuinely like ‘Y.M.C.A.’ and he’s having a lot of fun with it.”
“So I told my wife to inform BMI to not withdraw the Trump campaign political use license,” he also wrote. “My French partners were contemplating legal action out of France. So I had my wife contact our French partners and asked them to stay out of the Trump campaign’s use of ‘Y.M.C.A.’ because it is a U.S. matter, and I will make the decision on his use. Our French partners quickly backed off of their objection to his use.”
