President Trump boasted on Wednesday that he made “Y.M.C.A.” “a ‘monster’ hit” again, decades after its 1978 release, in a social media post that expressed condolences after the death of Victor Willis, the Village People’s lead singer.
He offered his highest compliment: “Victor and the group was there for us right from the beginning!”
Mr. Trump has a decidedly uncomplicated devotion to the Village People’s disco-pop hit “Y.M.C.A,” at times thought of as a gay anthem but now perhaps most often heard as the unofficial soundtrack to the president’s fist-pumping dance at rallies.
He seemed to view his relationship with the music group as similarly uncomplicated, according to his post celebrating Mr. Willis, who died on Monday at 74. “He was a great and happy guy who loved that I used his groups song, YMCA, at my Rallies,” Mr. Trump wrote.
But Mr. Willis and the Village People have not necessarily been enthusiastic about the song’s feature spot on the soundtrack of Trump rallies and Mar-a-Lago fund-raisers.
The group in 2020 responded to fans who had been pressuring it to stop letting Mr. Trump play “Y.M.C.A.” by saying it preferred that its music be “kept out of politics,” even though it said Mr. Trump’s use of the song was legal.
Later that year, as protests over the police killing of George Floyd grew, Mr. Willis, who co-wrote “Y.M.C.A,” criticized Mr. Trump for proposing to deploy the U.S. military to American cities in response to demonstrations. He told the president to stop using his songs.
“Sorry, but I can no longer look the other way,” Mr. Willis wrote on Facebook.
Three years later, the group sent a cease-and-desist letter to Mr. Trump over a video of him dancing to a tribute band playing “Y.M.C.A.” Karen Huff-Willis, Mr. Willis’s wife and the group’s manager, said the video made it appear that the real musical act had endorsed him.
But not long after, Mr. Willis seemed to come around to the use of the song, if not to Mr. Trump himself.
He told Billboard magazine in 2024 that he could ask his music licensing agency to revoke Mr. Trump’s political-use license for “Y.M.C.A.” but said that he would not, because Mr. Trump’s use “greatly benefited” the song. He said the constant use had sent it to the top of the charts. Still, he posted on social media that year that he was a registered Democrat who preferred Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential contest.
The Village People also performed at an event for Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, though Mr. Willis said it was not an endorsement of his policies. They danced on a stage flanking Mr. Trump, who pumped his fists and jutted his hips to the beat as the crowd waved “47” signs, for the new 47th president.
But this May, when the Village People traveled to India to serenade one of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for an official birthday cake-cutting, it seemed beyond doubt that the song was synonymous with not just Mr. Trump’s image but also his presidency.
The sexual undertones of songs like “Y.M.C.A.” and “Macho Man” have never seemed to bother Mr. Trump, who is known for his infatuation with the 1980s and that era of music.
Written by Mr. Willis and a gay French producer, Jacques Morali, “Y.M.C.A.” was released when disco was the soundtrack for L.G.B.T.Q. dance clubs. It was Mr. Morali’s idea to “create an act made up of amusingly dressed homosexual stereotypes, to write disco songs spoofing homosexual fantasies, and then to package the whole enterprise with plenty of nonthreatening good cheer to middle America,” the critic John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times the year after “Y.M.C.A.” was released.
Mr. Willis, who in 2024 threatened to sue media outlets that described “Y.M.C.A.” as a gay anthem, did not agree with the popular sexual interpretations of the song, telling people to get their “minds out of the gutter.” The pop hit has outlived the era of its debut, and by the 2000s it was heard at graduations and children’s birthdays as much as it was at Pride events.
According to Mr. Trump’s social media post, it is also the soundtrack of events for the nation’s 250th birthday, another celebration the president has made his own.
