When President Trump visited General Motors' Milford Proving Ground in Michigan and posted a celebratory social media video, his team set it to 'American Cars' — a folk-pop track by Vermont singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, co-written with Noah Levine. Nobody asked. Nobody paid. Nobody called.

Kahan's response was unambiguous. In a public statement, he wrote that he would 'never approve of my music being used in support of you,' addressing Trump directly. His co-writer Levine echoed the objection. Together they demanded the White House pull the track and cease using their work as a political prop.

The administration's response was not a retraction or an apology. A White House spokesperson publicly suggested that Kahan's objection was evidence of 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' — the administration's preferred diagnosis for anyone who criticizes the president. It is a telling escalation: rather than address the legal and ethical question of consent, the White House went straight to ridicule.

The consent question here is not trivial, and the administration knows it. U.S. copyright law generally requires licensing for the synchronization of a song to video — using a recording to underscore moving images is a distinct right from simply playing music in public. The wrinkle in this particular case is that Kahan's music was made available through a licensing arrangement with Meta, the parent company of Instagram, where the video was posted. That platform license may cover the mechanical act of posting — but it does not, legal experts have repeatedly noted in analogous cases, constitute the artist's personal endorsement or grant permission for explicitly political use.

This is a distinction the music industry has been fighting to establish for years. Artists from The Rolling Stones to Adele to Rihanna have publicly demanded that political campaigns stop using their music — and those demands have carried weight in some jurisdictions and fallen flat in others, depending on the licensing structure in play. The fundamental problem is that blanket platform licenses, negotiated between labels or publishers and tech companies, were never designed with political messaging in mind. They create a gap between what is technically permitted and what the artist actually consented to.

Kahan is not an apolitical figure. His music deals openly with themes of community, working-class anxiety, and belonging — and he has not hidden his politics. That makes the White House's choice of track either oblivious or deliberately provocative. 'American Cars' in particular leans into the kind of heartland iconography the administration likes to claim as its own. Using it without permission is, at minimum, an attempt to borrow cultural credibility the artist has explicitly refused to extend.

Kahan joins a list of artists who have found themselves in this position under Trump — a list that grew substantially during the 2024 campaign and has continued to expand into the administration's first months back in office. The pattern is consistent: music gets used, artist objects publicly, White House either ignores the objection or attacks the artist. No licensing negotiation. No retroactive request for permission. The implicit message is that the administration does not believe it needs the consent of artists whose work it finds useful.

What makes the White House's 'TDS' counterpunch notable is what it reveals about the administration's posture toward intellectual property when it conflicts with its messaging goals. Copyright is, in most contexts, a cause the political right treats as nearly sacred — the foundation of creator ownership and market incentive. The same coalition that has championed strong IP protections in trade negotiations appears entirely unbothered when those protections are inconvenient for a presidential Instagram post. That inconsistency deserves to be named plainly.

As of publication, it is not confirmed whether the video has been removed, whether Kahan and Levine have pursued formal legal action, or whether any licensing body has been engaged. What is confirmed: two songwriters said no, clearly and publicly, and the most powerful office in the country told them their objection was a symptom of mental illness. That is the story.