Neil Young has released a new song lambasting Donald Trump, entitled Big Crime.
The Canadian-American rocker has long been a critic of the US president, suing him (but later dropping the lawsuit) over the use of his songs at campaign rallies and calling him “the worst president in the history of our great country”.
He has stepped up that criticism in the new song, which has been posted to Young’s YouTube channel. Featuring his backing band the Chrome Hearts, it was recorded during a sound check at a concert on Chicago’s Northerly Island.
“There’s big crime in DC at the White House,” Young sings in the chorus, as a comment on Trump’s previous legal difficulties, as well as a sarcastic reference to Trump’s current crackdown on crime in Washington DC.
Trump declared a “crime emergency” in DC earlier this month, seized control of the city’s police force and deployed national guard troops. He claimed the move was aimed at “halting the precipitous rise in violent crime”, though in January the city’s police department and US attorney Matthew Graves had announced a 30-year low for crime there.
“Don’t need no fascist rules / don’t want no fascist schools / don’t want soldiers walking on the streets,” Young sings. “Got to get the fascists out / got to clean the White House out … no more money to the fascists, the billionaire fascists”.
Riffing on Trump’s “make America great again” slogan, Young adds: “No more great again.”
Young has previously criticised Trump in song, updating his 2006 song Lookin’ for a Leader in 2020 to include lyrics about him. “America has a leader building walls around our house / Who don’t know Black lives matter and we got to vote him out,” Young sang, characterising Trump as “scared of his own shadow”.
The 2006 original was targeted at then-president George W Bush, calling for “someone who’s straight and strong / to lead us from desolation and a broken world gone wrong”, and mooting Barack Obama for the task. It was included on the album Living With War, on which Young criticised Bush in the plainest terms possible with the song Let’s Impeach the President.
Trump used Young’s song Rockin’ in the Free World when announcing he was running for president in 2015 – possibly taking its anthemic chorus at face value rather than understanding the ironic meaning of a song charting social collapse during the Reagan era. Young said he supported Bernie Sanders for president and Trump dropped the use of the song, saying he “didn’t love it anyway”.
But it reappeared on the playlist at a 2020 rally along with another Young song, Devil’s Sidewalk. Young sued Trump over the use, with the lawsuit stating that Young “cannot allow his music to be used as a ‘theme song’ for a divisive, un-American campaign of ignorance and hate”. Young later voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit.
Young, who became a dual US-Canadian citizen in 2020 and called Trump “a disgrace to my country” that year, expressed worry earlier in 2025 that his criticism of Trump would mean he would not be allowed back into the US. “When I go to play music in Europe, if I talk about Donald J Trump, I may be one of those returning to America who is barred or put in jail to sleep on a cement floor with an aluminium blanket,” he wrote on his website.
