Village People singer backs Trump after years of feud over Y.M.C.A.

Donald Trump praised Victor Willis after the Village People singer’s death, saying Willis was with him “right from the beginning.”

Willis publicly asked Trump to stop using both songs in June 2020, after Trump’s handling of the George Floyd protests. He said he could “no longer look the other way” and later described the repeated play as a nuisance. Willis said he had received more than 1,000 complaints as the song became a fixture of Trump’s events.

By late 2024, Willis had reversed course. He said Trump’s use of “Y.M.C.A.” was not an endorsement and that the campaign had a proper political-use license through BMI. He also said the song had “benefited greatly” from Trump’s rallies, pushing it to No. 1 on a Billboard chart for the first time in more than 40 years and keeping it there for two weeks.

Willis has repeatedly denied that “Y.M.C.A.” was written as a “gay anthem,” saying he based it on YMCA branches in urban San Francisco and on 1970s black slang. A California federal judge gave Willis a victory in a separate rights reversion case over the song.

The conflict escalated again in May 2023, when Karen Willis, Victor Willis’s wife and the Village People’s manager, sent Trump a cease-and-desist letter after a Mar-a-Lago video showed Trump dancing to a Village People lookalike band performing “Macho Man.” The letter said the performance created public confusion about endorsement and warned that if the unauthorized image use continued, it could pursue the music itself.

The relationship turned again in January 2025, when the Village People accepted Trump’s invitation to perform at several inauguration events, including at least one appearance with Trump himself. Willis said then that music should be performed “without regard to politics.”