Hip-hop is ripe to be capitalized on, and GOP operatives are taking advantage while trying to take over swing states. Already, artists like Fivio Foreign, Kodak Black, and Sexyy Red have advocated for Donald Trump in various ways this election cycle (some with the help of Billy McFarland). Trump’s campaign is transparently pandering to Black voters through photo ops and with snippets from his speeches appearing in songs like Fivio and Kodak’s “ONBOA47RD,” a baffling political endorsement track.
However, Trump and his team aren’t the first crop of conservatives to attempt to reach voters with hip-hop. In 1992, California resident Steve Gooden, performing under the name TRQ (The Real Question), gained notoriety for a song called “We Are Americans,” which he performed at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Over three decades later, Gooden tells Rolling Stone that GOP operatives were looking for a pro-police alternative to Ice T’s incendiary protest anthem, “Cop Killer,” a song condemned by President George H.W. Bush as “sick” for speaking to the furor that incited the 1992 LA uprising. With no outwardly Republican rappers in ‘92, he says the GOP reached out to him to be their hip-hop mascot.
“The GOP simply saw me as an opportunity to combat the left-wing anti-cop establishment in hip-hop music allegedly as perceived by them,” he says. “Remember, hip-hop was new. The [GOP] was not understanding the angst or the verbiage that we use when we are protesting.”
His surreal 1992 appearance on late conservative media personality Wally George’s Hot Seat television show is an early glimpse of Republicans manipulating hip-hop for their own agenda. George, who called himself “The Father of Combat TV,” starts the segment off calling TRQ “a great rapper, a pro-America rapper, a pro-Republican rapper” to raucous applause.
Eventually, Gooden, clad in an American flag bandana and suspenders, proceeds to rap his campy “We Are Americans” number to a mostly white crowd who don’t seem to enjoy the song as much as a pre-cameraphone era chance to be filmed. After singing the opening lines of “America the Beautiful,” he belts out a Flavor Flav-aping “Yeah boy!” It feels trippy to hear a trademark of Public Enemy, anti-establishment heroes, on a song with the lyrics, “I’m proud to be called a Republican.” Gooden’s ad-lib choice, and use of the Soul Searchers drum break from Eric B and Rakim’s “Paid In Full,” orients the listener in co-optive waters. The clip is a glimpse of a bygone era of surreal talk show television; it feels like Bill O’Reilly and Phil Donahue met on a Venn diagram.
In a 1992 LA Times report about his performance, he said, “I let [the Republican party] know how I wanted to be helpful to our President of our United States. I think at this moment my country is calling me, my President needs me. I’m making my little contribution to his re-election.” But today, he says that “We Are Americans” wasn’t written as a pro-Republican or pro-Bush song, and he was using the GOP like they were using him. “I’ll stand on your shoulders if you’ll let me so I can shout my message.” For the colorful, opinionated DC native, his conservative platforming was a chance to express “the message I’ve been preaching since I was six years old.” What message is that? “Our rights are given by God, by no political party,” he tells me over the phone.
(Though the LA Times piece claims that he reached out to the GOP to perform “We Are Americans,” he maintains that Republican officials reached out to him. “You always have to follow up reports,” he instructs. “The LA Times is a particularly left-wing liberal newspaper.”)
Gooden grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father was in the nightclub business. Gooden’s mother left their family when he was six, and his then-ailing father disappeared from the family in Gooden’s late teens. By that time, he’d become a youth Pastor in D.C. and was speaking at churches nationwide. In 1983, he was set to move to Daly City, California, with a family friend, but he had a change of heart. “I felt uncomfortable as I was on the bus heading out west. I’m like, ‘That’s not a new start. I’ll go someplace I’ve never been: Los Angeles.’”
These days, Gooden says he wouldn’t wear a flag bandana like he did in the nineties. He felt “it was necessary at that point and time in history to do that.” In 2024, it doesn’t seem like he’d do much stumping for either party. “Trump, Biden, what difference does it make?” he asks rhetorically. “Neither one makes a difference because neither one is the reason why we are in the predicament that we’re in.” His comments on the Democratic party feel like a hodgepodge of what artists like Kanye West, Ice Cube, and Icewear Vezzo have expressed in recent years.
“[Black people] are the most monolithic community in America,” he surmises. “The Democrats take us for granted because they always can count on it. You don’t have to satisfy and do what you promise to do because you know we already got them sewn up into the vote. And that’s why it’s always back and forth with these fake promises,” he says. “I used to say to my Black brothers and sisters, ‘Why can’t we be as diverse as white people? They’re all over the place. Why are 90% of us voting one party?’ Does that even make damn sense?”
Gooden’s anger at the establishment was palpable throughout our conversation. He spoke in a low, brooding tone as he reeled through his immense knowledge of history and railed at perceived injustices. At times, I was with him: Biden’s comments that Black voters who didn’t support him “weren’t Black” was indicative of taking Black people for granted, and both parties could do more for oppressed people in general. But he loses me when he chastises marginalized groups with the kind of derision you’d expect from Breitbart commentators and Twitter eggs. That may be part of the point. “I never talked for people to like me. In fact, if you like me, I usually frown. I think there’s something wrong with you. Why would you like me? I’m rare.”
What’s often unmentioned during outrage cycles over the latest MAGA-affiliated rapper is the disillusionment that leads people toward right-wing worldviews in the first place. The American project wasn’t created with an equitable resolution in mind, and many of us are here with no knowledge of our lineage. Hip-hop came about as a response to the contradictions of American life, and within that have come moments where rappers engaged with fringe groups. Whether it’s flirting with MAGA, ADOS, Hebrew Israelites, or the Nation of Islam, it’s all rooted in trying to figure out what home looks like.
Sometimes, like with Gooden, people can align with unsavory “allies” in their journey through making sense of the world. We see that with artists like Kanye West and the growing number of rappers more openly expressing support for Donald Trump in this election. And it’s not just hip-hop, either. Reggaeton artists like Nicky Jam and Anuell AA recently came under fire for expressing their support for Trump.
Gooden’s parlay with the Republicans preceded digital infamy and hip-hop’s dominance over youth culture. Back in 1992, there were no young conservative intermediaries like McFarland in rappers’ circles, and hip-hop hadn’t become a multi-billion dollar industry, meaning there weren’t clusters of millionaire rappers willing to sell out their community by co-signing a far-right campaign. Hip-hop has always had its own constellation of conservative worldviews, but in 1992, the notion of a staunchly Republican rapper would have been a sideshow. Today, it’s more or less the norm.
Gooden says that the hip-hop community sold itself out. “Hip-hop has been hijacked by the powers that be,” he says, adding that “hip-hop used to speak to [the people] boldly, unabashedly, unashamedly and rather crudely.” But now, he thinks the community “got a little too polished. You give anybody enough shine, enough women, enough pain, and it only becomes about them. Forget the cause and the people.”
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