Lara Trump Breaking Into Country Music with Cover of Iconic Song
Lara Trump has channeled the Trump family’s defiance of its critics into a cover of the classic Tom Petty song, “Won’t Back Down.”
Official sales of the song were set to begin Sept. 29 through Mailman Media’s country music sub-label First Class Records. Pre-sales of the song began Sept. 22.
The core of the song comes in its first few lines, which, according to Genius, go, “Well, I won’t back down / No, I won’t back down; You can stand me up at the gates of hell / But I won’t back down; No, I’ll stand my ground / Won’t be turned around.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump used the song at a rally, but was given a cease-and-desist notice by the family of the dead rocker, according to NPR.
The family howled again after Lara Trump used the phrase in response to an indictment against her father-in-law, former President Donald Trump, for payments made in 2016, according to an exclusive report by the Gateway Pundit.
“After the first indictment, I posted a photo of my father-in-law, and I was like, “What can I caption this?” What do I say about what’s going on? Because this is absolutely insane, the stuff that’s happening in our country,” she said, saying that the Petty song’s lyrics popped into her head.
A few weeks later, she was told the post was removed.
She said the message from Petty’s family was, “we’re not Trump fans, and the fact that these lyrics were written underneath, we got to take that down and cut her off.”
But stifling anyone in the Trump family – even by marriage — is easier to say than do.
“And so whenever we were chatting about it, I was like, I know what song we’re gonna do. I feel like it’s very representative, too, of how a lot of people feel right now. People are just kind of fed up,” she said.
That’s Donald Trump. He’s Not Backing Down” – Lara Trump Records Tom Pettys ‘Won’t Back Down’ Cover Song to be Released September 29 pic.twitter.com/MLjCBVxbnT
— ShotGunBonnie (@ShotGun_Bonnie) September 15, 2023
Lara Trump said the recording is not a gotcha at Petty’s family, but rather “a message to the country that we can’t back down. We can’t stop fighting for this country.”
“I think that there certainly are people who would rather us just kind of lay down, and take it, and let this country kind of fade off into the sunset. But I think that there are millions of Americans who are fighting to keep this country, the country they grew up in for their kids, like me. That’s what I want for my kids one day. So I think the song can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I got no message for the Petty family because I don’t even think about them,” she said.
She called the attacks on the former president “unprecedented.”
“We’ve never seen something like this in this country, and I think It’s very frightening, It is very dystopian, it’s very communist and authoritarian in its nature, and I think whenever people, even people who don’t necessarily like my father in law, see what is being done to him, the way that one man is being targeted, and every system is being weaponized against him, I think that’s a very scary place for a lot of Americans to look and see because today it’s Donald Trump, but tomorrow, it could be you,” she said.
“If the establishment, if the government, if those in charge decide that they’re unhappy with you, what can happen to you? It’s so obvious what they’re doing, and that’s even more frightening, I think; they’re not even trying to hide it at this point,” she said.
Lara Trump boiled the antipathy to her father-in-law to the basics of power.
“I don’t think the establishment folks like that. I don’t think they like a guy coming in who they can’t control, who really does what he thinks is best, regardless of how it impacts the swamp, so to speak,” she said, adding that he “is a threat to the way things have run in Washington, D.C. for a long time.”
Label President LJ Fino called the country-flavored cover “incredibly emblematic of President Trump’s movement, and I think Lara did it tremendous justice.”
Amazing Won’t Back Down cover by @LaraLeaTrump to be released September 29@edhenry @LjFino pic.twitter.com/vYQy3QJViN
— Jordan Conradson🇺🇸 (@ConradsonJordan) September 14, 2023
In an August interview with The Hill, she said the political persecution of Donald Trump will fail, saying that his booking in Georgia “just solidified Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States.”
“His poll numbers continue to rise every single time they try to throw something like this his way because I think it becomes more and more obvious to the country what they’re trying to do and why it is so dangerous – why this precedent can not succeed here in America,” she said.
She summed up the 2024 presidential election as “our last chance to save this country.”
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