Country music singer Zach Bryan made waves with Republicans when he included lyrics about the impact of mass deportations in his song, “Bad News.” While he’s been on the receiving end of negative comments from Donald Trump supporters and officials, like Kristi Noem, he did get some support from the cohosts of The View on Friday’s (October 10) episode.
After reviewing the lyrics of the song in question — “ICE is gonna come bust down your door, try to build a house no one builds no more, but I got a telephone, Kids are all scared and all alone” — and Noem’s reaction, the cohosts weighed in.
Ana Navarro said, “I think a lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they thought the border was out of control, and they approve of the border getting closed, but they also heard Donald Trump say over and over again that he was going to go after the worst of the worst barbarians. He calls them monsters. … We are seeing with our own eyes that the people that are getting rounded up, racially profiled, detained, deported, are not the worst of the worst. They are our friends, they are our colleagues. They are our neighbors, they are our family.”
She then pointed to the recent ICE raids in Chicago as an example of overreach and added, “I think that’s what this country singer Zach Bryan is responding to, and he didn’t say anything offensive about ICE. He said ICE is going to come and bust down your door. We’ve all seen them do that. He’s going — he said kids are all scared and all alone… 70+ percent of the people who have been detained do not have criminal records. So they are lying to you when they say it is the worst of the worst.”
Sara Haines then offered a similar take by saying, “I think even people who voted for Trump and wanted, like you said, to close the border and fix the system, could agree that we’re living in a divided time and that with ICE, all the video we’re seeing of them coming into communities, that is scary. I don’t think that’s debatable. His lyrics are literally just saying, ‘I got a telephone kids are all scared and all alone.’ Artists have always sung about the world around us what they see. He’s not taking a stance.” She then pointed out that Bryan is a military veteran and added, “He did have a response. He said, ‘Everyone using this now as a weapon is only proving how devastatingly divided we all are. I served this country. I love this country, and the song itself is about all of us coming out of this divided space.’”
“Yeah, he’s a Navy veteran, and Kristi Noem didn’t seem to get that,” Alyssa Farah Griffin agreed before adding that he also never endorsed a political candidate in the past. She then went on to support Bryan by saying, “I think we’re so quick in this polarized environment to be like, you’re red or blue, you fit either all of these issues and agree on all these things, or you agree on none of them. And this is an artist making music, and I’m sensitive to the fact we live in an environment where you’re seeing things that are horrifying happening by ICE, you’re also seeing attacks on ICE agents and ICE facilities.. But not a word, to Sara’s point, of what he says in these lyrics is insightful, is bashing. It is social commentary on the moment that we live in, which is what music has always done. And by the way, no one has a monopoly on country music.”
The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC