Somehow, Donald Trump has bolstered his 2024 campaign with an appearance on a rap record. Today, Fivio Foreign and Kodak Black released “ONBOA47RD,” a Trump ad in which Kodak concludes, “I didn’t even see that many black people released during the Obama era / I told her she can have anything she wants but not my Donald chain,” and in which Fivio raps, “I look at the gang and pledge allegiance / So we’re all Donald’s secret.”
Is Fivio referring to the Secret Service? Who knows. From start to finish, the song is a series of bad decisions. The title is awful because it sounds like a desperate bid for influence written in an easy-to-find format. Perhaps Fivio came up with the title after a night at Maimi. Both artists and Trump are credited as authors of the song, as is Billy McFarland, who has linked rappers to the campaign.
The song features clips of Trump spouting the most boring platitudes he can think of. In the first, from his 2017 inaugural address, Trump says, “I will fight for you with every breath I take, and I will never let you down.” And in the second, from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last month, “I’m not supposed to be here tonight. I’m here today to announce a brand new plan to bring more opportunity, more safety, and more justice.” Trump goes viral several times a week with lies and inflammatory statements about marginalized communities, yet they haven’t chosen clips that show why he is such a divisive figure; aside from the reference to his shooting, the crux of these generic comments may come down to any Politician.
The audio clips dangerously trivialize Trump’s political views by portraying him as a champion of the people and ignoring the fascist undertones of his campaign. It seems fitting for the modern mainstream rap scene that the only political point Kodak makes in the song is false: Obama pardoned 1,927 people, while Trump pardoned only 237. Since the 20th century, only the Bushes have pardoned fewer people than Trump, who benefited from the spectacular pardons of Kodak Black and Lil Wayne, earning him an undeserved reputation as an advocate of justice.
Unfortunately, these pardons may be the reason why Kay Flock, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, all of whom are facing trial, have recently supported Trump. Even though the latter are involved in state-level proceedings for which Trump cannot pardon them, they may believe that he something for them. Fivio has worked with all three men. He’s probably interested in seeing them at home and away from legal danger. Still, he should be thinking about what else a Trump administration might bring. People who like to read headlines and tweets but not full reports often point out that neither side of the American political spectrum is different. While that’s true when it comes to maintaining imperialism and neither side is willing to make radical changes to eradicate systemic inequality, there’s no doubt that Trump is more interested in reverse engineering the country.
I’ve written before about the fascism of Project 2025, a platform that Trump constantly lies about being complicit in. Even if we want to believe him, his publicly acknowledged program, Agenda 47, also aims to harm communities in Fivio’s hometown of New York and Kodak’s hometown of Pompano Beach, Florida. Trump plans to cut federal funding to all schools that teach “critical race theory,” enforce broken windows policies like stop and frisk (which don’t address the root cause of crime), and seek the death penalty for drug dealers. Trump also wants to roll back Biden’s climate policies. The history of environmental racism in America shows that poor communities will be the last to receive the help they need as climate change makes extreme weather events like hurricanes more frequent.
When Trump was asked in 2016 what year he thought America was great, he pointed to the “late ’40s and ’50s” in the heat of Jim Crow laws. His policies seek to take us back to that white supremacist past while his rich cronies wave their fists. Perhaps Fivio and Kodak want to be the black faces of that cohort, at the expense of millions of people who look like them. Hip-hop is one of the primary vehicles of black Americans’ social advancement, but it has created a troubling paradox. Economic advancement has opened the door for entertainers to use our support and money to out-run us while celebrating politicians who want to make our lives even harder. It took me about 10 minutes to confirm these readily available facts about Agenda 47. These men don’t even have that much time to read who they’re writing odes to. Or maybe they already know and don’t care.
The three-minute single is the latest unnerving cross between the MAGA world and hip-hop. There were once rumors that 50 Cent would perform at the Republican National Convention. Lil Pump is a staunch Trump supporter who considered recording a diss track about Kamala Harris. French Montana snapped a photo with RNC co-chair Lara Trump. Streamer Adin Ross interviewed the presidential hopeful, who stepped on camera to 50 Cent’s “Many Men.” There’s been a full-blown love affair with Trump, who too many rappers have emulated as a flamboyant loudmouth with alarming narcissism, a talent for upsetting the news cycle, and no sense of nuance. People have called “ONBOA47RD” shocking, but it shouldn’t be anymore. Trump’s political presence has highlighted mainstream hip-hop’s deterioration into a cesspool of violent, ignorant, bigoted patriarchy. But perhaps these embarrassments were inevitable in a capitalist endeavor.
While delivering the verse of a lifetime on Kanye West’s “Off The Grid,” Fivio said, “If you got a voice, you gotta broadcast it / If you done something wrong, you gotta fix it.” He should take his own advice by doing what J. Cole did and taking this nonsense off streaming.
