The daughters of the late performer Oscar Brown Jr. said President Donald Trump is perverting the meaning of their father’s song “The Snake” when he recites it during speeches and have demanded that he stop doing it, The Hill reported on Sunday.
“He’s twisting Oscar’s meaning to serve his own campaign and climate of intolerance and hate, which is the opposite of what the original author, Oscar Brown Jr., intended,” Maggie Brown said on MSNBC.
Trump is “perversely using the snake to demonize immigrants,” Africa Brown said. “My father never stood against immigrants. He was always standing up for people and not about separatism.”
She added that the president's use of her father's work is "an insult to the deep respect for humanity" that her father believed in.
Oscar Brown Jr., who died in 2005, was a singer, songwriter, playwright poet and activist, as well as a one-time member of the Communist Party. He wrote “The Snake” in 1963, telling the story of a woman taking in a snake to nurse it back to health, only for the snake to bite her.
Trump recited the song as recently as Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
If Dad were alive, he would’ve ripped [Trump] with a great poem in rebuttal,” Brown’s daughter Maggie told the Chicago Tribune.
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