Activism in music feels more important than ever. Then again, maybe it always has been.
From folk singers with an acoustic guitar and something to say to punk bands turning three chords into a political weapon, music has long been one of the quickest ways to get an idea out of your head and into somebody else’s.
Dwayna Litz isn’t interested in being subtle about hers.
Her latest single, ‘Dump Trump’, is exactly what it says on the tin: an old-school country protest song aimed squarely at Donald Trump, his administration and the direction Litz believes America is heading.
Trump is currently serving his second, non-consecutive term as US president, and Litz would quite clearly prefer that arrangement to end sooner rather than later.
There is something genuinely refreshing about how straight-laced the whole thing is.
Musically, ‘Dump Trump’ harks back to a quintessential kind of country songwriting where the lyric is king.
The playing is tight, the chorus is immediate and Litz sings with the conviction of someone who knows exactly what she wants to say.
There are no layers of metaphor to peel away and very little room for misunderstanding, which suits the song.
“It’s time to dump Trump” is a hook built to be shouted back, but Litz is clever enough not to hang the entire track on a novelty phrase.
She turns Trump’s own political branding back on him, takes aim at late-night posting, the Epstein files, war and US support for Israel, and repeatedly returns to her opposition to what she describes as the funding of genocide.
The official video and song make those targets explicit.
Nothing really gets left out.
One minute she is taking a dig at Trump’s online behaviour, the next she is zooming out considerably further: “This is super power suicide / We’re now an empire in decline.”
That is where ‘Dump Trump’ becomes more interesting than its deliberately blunt title suggests.
Empires rise and empires fall. Litz clearly believes she is watching the latter happen in real time, and rather than dress that anxiety up in something prettier, she puts it straight into the song.
There is anger here, yes, but underneath it is a fairly traditional country impulse: concern for home, community and what gets left behind when the people running things lose sight of both.
Litz even reaches back to Abraham Lincoln, invoking his famous warning about a country ultimately destroying itself from within. The line is sometimes paraphrased as “if we get destroyed, it will be from within,” but Lincoln’s actual 1838 Lyceum Address is even stronger: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
Nearly two centuries later, those words still have some bite.
For Litz, this sort of songwriting comes from somewhere deeply personal. She has been writing professionally for years, including co-writing ‘Let Me Be There for You’, recorded by Patti LaBelle, and has been increasingly folding activism into her recent work.
She is also adamant that her songs remain human-made, describing AI songwriting as fundamentally at odds with her habit of writing when something simply pours out.
You can hear that philosophy all over ‘Dump Trump’.
Whether you agree with every line is almost beside the point of reviewing it. Protest music that spends too much time worrying about pleasing everybody usually isn’t much use as protest music.
‘Dump Trump’ plants its flag, names names and gets on with it.
Heart firmly on sleeve, Litz has made the kind of country song that remembers the genre can do more than tell you who broke your heart.
Sometimes it can tell you exactly who pissed you off.
Listen to ‘Dump Trump’ below.
