Donald Trump has claimed his dance moves to Village People‘s ‘Y.M.C.A.’ brought the song to the top of the charts.
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The US President addressed a crowd at The Villages retirement community in Florida on Friday (May 1) and suggested that he was largely to thank for the 2024 chart resurgence of the 1970s tune, which became an unlikely anthem throughout his campaign.
Trump also told the crowd that his wife Melania wasn’t a fan of his embrace of the track. “She hates when I dance to what is sometimes referred to as the gay national anthem,” he said. “She hates it.”
‘Y.M.C.A.’ topped the Billboard sales charts in late 2024, decades after it first debuted in 1979. Recounting the disco classic’s chart resurgence, Trump incorrectly inflated the statistics, stating that it “went to number one for months”, when, in actuality, the track only spent six weeks at the top spot.
“We love that song,” Trump continued on Friday. “But [Melania] goes, ‘Darling, please.’ You know, she’s a very elegant woman. She goes, ‘Darling, please don’t dance. It’s not presidential.’ I said, ‘It may not be presidential, but I’m leading by 20 points in the polls or something.’”
Trump on dancing to YMCA by Village People:
“Melania hates when I dance to what’s sometimes referred to as the gay national anthem.” 😭 pic.twitter.com/z15reN4gCB
— johnny maga (@johnnymaga) May 1, 2026
The president later broke out his signature dance moves – a stiff double fist pump and hip shake – as the song rang out at the end of his address.
When he ran for president for a second time in 2024, Trump concluded over 110 rallies with the the track, per ABC News. Despite initially asking him not to use ‘Y.M.C.A.’ in 2020 after the President seemingly threatened to shoot Black Lives Matter protestors in Minneapolis, Village People frontman Victor Willis retracted his disapproval in 2021.
Explaining his change of heart at the time, Willis wrote: “I said to my wife one day, ‘Hey, Trump seems to genuinely like ‘Y.M.C.A.’ and he’s having a lot of fun with it’. As such, I simply didn’t have the heart to prevent his continued use of my song in the face of so many artists withdrawing his use of their material. So I told my wife to inform BMI to not withdraw the Trump campaign political use license.”
In 2025, he also addressed his band’s performance at his inauguration, acknowledging that although “this won’t make some of you happy to hear”, they did so out of the belief that “music is to be performed without regard to politics.”
The use of ‘Y.M.C.A.’ in US politics stems back to 2020 too, when crowds outside the White House played the song to troll Trump after his loss to Joe Biden.
Late last month (April 25), Trump was evacuated from the The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner and hundreds of attendees were forced to hide under tables after reports of gunfire at the Washington Hilton hotel.
This prompted Bruce Springsteen – who has been involved in multiple heated disputes with the President in recent years – to put their feud briefly to one side and share his gratitude that no one was injured.
