Donald Trump Campaign’s Payment for Use of Foo Fighters Song Headed to Kamala Harris

Add the Foo Fighters to the growing list of musicians ticked off by the presidential campaign for GOP nominee Donald Trump. As widely expected, on Friday the former president was joined onstage by erstwhile independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., part of their now-shared campaign’s plan to stymie Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s White House aspirations. Less predicted was the Trump campaign’s decision to introduce the alleged sexual assailant (oh, sorry, I should specify—I’m talking about RFK, Jr.) with the song “My Hero,” the Foo Fighters’s song celebrating the most ordinary among us.

At the Friday event in Arizona, Kennedy confirmed that he would endorse Trump as he suspended—but not did not end—his campaign and suggested, the Associated Press reports, that “Trump offered him a job if he returns to the White House.” The scion hasn’t lost hope that he could still win the presidency, telling the Washington Post that if “neither of the candidates wins 270 electoral votes, which is quite possible—in fact, today our polling shows them tying at 269-269—I could conceivably still end up in the White House in a contingent election.” Thus far, any news of a reciprocal job offer from a prospective President Kennedy to Trump has not been reported.

As Kennedy took the stage Friday to officially seal the deal with rally-holder Trump, the loudspeakers played the Foo Fighters’s 1998 song. Was the intention to communicate that RFK was Trump’s hero, or vice versa? No one knows, but we do know that the Foo Fighters were not happy about it.

Via X (formerly Twitter), the Foo Fighters posted a screenshot of an exchange between its account and that of another user, in which the Dave Grohl-fronted band confirmed that the Trump campaign did not have permission to use their song for campaign purposes.

In a statement reported on by Entertainment Weekly and others, the band confirmed via a spokesperson that they “were not asked permission, and if they were, they would not have granted it.” Any royalties generated by Trump’s use of the song will be donated to the Harris-Tim Walz campaign, the spokesperson said.

The Foo Fighters aren’t the first artists to distance themselves from the Trump campaign, nor is this the first time they’ve drubbed a campaign for their use of this particular song. Two weeks ago, Celine Dion called the former president out for his use of the Titanic theme song “My Heart Will Go On,” saying then that she “does not endorse this or any similar use.”

And earlier this week, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung used Beyonce’s song “Freedom”—an anthem widely understood to be permitted for use by the Harris campaign—as a soundtrack to footage of the former president. After Beyonce’s camp reportedly threatened legal action, the video was deleted. According to USA TODAY, other artists who say Trump has co-opted their work include the Village People (Trump frequently uses their 1978 hit “YMCA”) and the estate of Isaac Hayes, which has demanded $3 million in royalties for the unauthorized use of Hayes-penned Sam & Dave classic, “Hold On, I’m Comin.”

Meanwhile, in 2008, the Foo Fighters managed a similar issue with song use—this time, during then-Republican senator John McCain’s failed bid for US president. After McCain’s campaign made “My Hero” its theme song, the band responded, “It’s frustrating and infuriating that someone who claims to speak for the American people would repeatedly show such little respect for creativity and intellectual property.”

“The saddest thing about this is that ‘My Hero’ was written as a celebration of the common man and his extraordinary potential,” the Foo Fighters continued at the time. “To have it appropriated without our knowledge and used in a manner that perverts the original sentiment of the lyric just tarnishes the song.”