The Anti-Trump Politics of the Dropkick Murphys

This is a particularly bad time in the history of the United States. Every day provides more evidence of how far our country has moved from the values that we were taught were fundamental to its existence. America was once portrayed as a land of liberty, free expression, and democracy. Today, it is a country in which universities collaborate with the President to suppress the speech of their students. It is a country in which innocent people are grabbed from sidewalks, homes, and even courthouses by unidentified masked agents and shoved into unmarked vehicles, vanishing into detention centers both within the country and abroad. America has become the type of country that we were once warned about and taught to fear. But, in the midst of all this, I have found one simple reason for joy. One of my favorite bands, the Dropkick Murphys, has unexpectedly — at least to me — gained viral popularity as a voice opposed to cult leader, convicted felon, and failed President Donald Trump and his MAGA cult members.

In hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised. Dropkick Murphys were formed in 1996, and I first found out about the band a few years later when I stumbled across their song, "Barroom Hero". I immediately liked their style of music, which the Washington Post described as "combining the Clash and the Pogues". Their lyrics evinced a working-class populist viewpoint with especially strong support for unions. The title song of their debut studio album, "Do or Die”, starts off with "The once steel-tough fabric of a Union man, Was sold and Bartered away, Fed to money wolves in the Reagan years" and goes on to call for workers to "rise" and "push for human rights". Similarly, "10 Years of Service", released as a single from their second album, "The Gang's All Here", is the lament of a striking worker who cannot achieve a standard of living that "doesn't exist in 1999". The theme that the rich are screwing over the working man runs throughout the music of the Dropkick Murphys.

While punk rock has at times been associated with White nationalists and Nazis, the Dropkick Murphys could not be further away from that politically. When a man with a shaved head got up on stage during a concert in Australia and made a "Heil Hitler" gesture, founding member and singer Ken Casey clobbered him with his bass guitar. Guitarist Tim Brennan later said that "people like that are not welcome at our shows. Period." Casey, whose normal stage persona is that of a fun-loving jokester, seems to undergo a near-complete personality change when he encounters anyone close to being a Nazi and has absolutely no tolerance for them.

Given the drift of much of the working class — including an unfortunate number of union members — to MAGA politics, the Dropkick Murphys might have been expected to make a similar transition. Instead, the opposite happened. Casey has always been outspoken about politics and especially about Trump. During the first Trump administration, the Murphys released "First Class Loser" on their album, "11 Short Stories of Pain & Glory". The song is about a person who is a "bully", a "jerk", and "everything that you despise". While the song is not specifically about Trump, Casey began regularly dedicating the song to the President during concerts. Then, in 2021 on the song "Chosen Few" on the "Turn Up That Dial" album, the band took a direct shot at Trump and his handling of COVID. Singing "These last ten long months our division really grew, When the guy in charge said, 'It's just another flu'", the song calls for Americans to come together again after the division of the Trump years. When Trump lost the 2020 election, Casey, who does not drink or use drugs, said that he would celebrate by his blood pressure going down.

The Dropkick Murphys’ most well-known song, "Shipping Up to Boston," was composed of unpublished lyrics written by Woody Guthrie. The band has a close relationship with Guthrie's daughter, Nora, and she invited them to go through her father's archives and select lyrics to use for their own songs. Guthrie was an outspoken champion of socialist policies and may even have been a member of the Communist Party (this is disputed). While the Dropkick Murphys have not gone that far left, the band is clearly sympathetic to many of Guthrie's political ideas. The band released two albums comprised of songs created from Guthrie’s lyrics. Many of the songs on these albums call for working people to fight fascism. One, "The Last One", has a line saying, "How can you worship the rich man who sees poor folks and refuses them?“ Casey has commented that the lyric accurately sums up Donald Trump.

It should not have been a surprise to me then that when Trump won the 2024 presidential election, the Dropkick Murphys would return to their anti-Trump politics. When I saw the band this past February, each of their monitors had a sign attached to it expressing solidarity with government unions. At that time, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had just been eliminated (it has been resurrected, eliminated, and resurrected a few times since then), and Casey spoke up in support of both the agency and the fired employees. To me, that was fairly normal and perhaps even restrained behavior from the band, and I didn't think too much about it. Over the following weeks, however, friends who know that I am a DKM fan repeatedly sent me clips of Casey making anti-Trump diatribes during other concerts on the tour. In one of these, Casey bet a fan who was wearing a MAGA shirt that his shirt was not made in the U.S.A. When it turned out that the shirt was, in fact, produced in Nicaragua, the fan took off the shirt, and Casey gave him a union-made in the U.S.A. DKM shirt in exchange. Apparently, clips of this interaction have been widely viewed on social media. In another viral video, Casey singled out a fan who had been holding up a MAGA hat. Casey asked how you knew who was in a cult and then said that it was the guy holding up a "fucking hat the whole night". Things soon got to the point that new DKM videos of the band doing something anti-Trump seem to be popping up almost daily in my social media feeds (or being sent to me by friends).

How much the Dropkick Murphys had become associated with being anti-Trump struck me when I saw Ken Casey being interviewed on the "MeidasTouch" podcast. This is one of the most popular podcasts currently. Casey was not there to talk about his music, but rather his politics. Casey and the Dropkick Murphys were also featured on an episode of TYTSports, part of The Young Turks network. Then I came across a promotion on Bluesky for a new website published by former Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin and former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen. The background music for the video was "Shipping Up to Boston". Neither Rubin nor Eisen have any connection to Boston of which I am aware, and I strongly doubt that either is much of a punk rock fan. But their promotion was almost entirely devoted to anti-Trump messages. My assumption is that when Rubin and Eisen considered music to use in their video, the Dropkick Murphys was the first anti-Trump band to come to mind. Indeed, the video has a shot of the band playing at Boston's "Hands Off" protest. Incidentally, how did the Dropkick Murphys feel about their music being used to promote an anti-Trump publication? They reposted the video on their own Bluesky account.

I am thrilled that one of my favorite bands, a band with which I have had a near obsession for 25 years or more, is gaining new prominence in this dreadful time of American history. In a recent interview, Casey said that the band's forthcoming album would be a strong response to Trump. So, both musically and politically, I am looking forward to the album with great anticipation. The last time that I saw the Dropkick Murphys, Casey said that some fans argued that they should "just shut up and sing." He said that the band had been political from the beginning — something that I have shown to be true in this post — and if you came to a DKM show expecting something else, you had made a mistake. I, for one, am thankful for that.