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Mike Dirnt Explains Why Green Day Waited Until Now to Write About Trump

Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt explains why the band waited nearly a decade to respond to Donald Trump's rise, and reacts to Elon Musk's diss.

What he didn’t expect was that his trio — with singer Billie Joe Armstrong and drummer Tré Cool — would draw heavy fire from the right literally seconds into the new year after Armstrong slightly changed a lyric in “American Idiot” from “I’m not part of the redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of a MAGA agenda” during a performance on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest. Billie told me a few years back that had your middle school not merged with his thanks to budgeting issues in the town, you two wouldn’t have become friends, and his entire life would have been completely different. It speaks to the fact that Billie’s dad was a Teamster truck driver, and his mom was a waitress, and somehow they could afford to raise five kids and buy a home, and that just doesn’t work for everybody anymore.

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