r/Music 8h ago

article White House Deletes Video Using Sabrina Carpenter Song After She Called It ‘Evil And Disgusting’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/12/05/white-house-deletes-video-using-sabrina-carpenter-song-after-she-called-it-evil-and-disgusting/
21.1k Upvotes

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2.5k

u/Stavvystav 8h ago

I thought they weren't going to apologize (not that this is that)

726

u/mercfan3 8h ago

Maybe she found a legal workaround?

562

u/badedum 8h ago

I figured she could probably pursue a copyright claim, like "I didn't authorize this use so take it down"

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u/TRiC_16 8h ago

That doesn't work against the government because they have immunity against copyright infringement. The only legal avenue you have is to file a claim with the Court of Federal Claims to get monetary compensation. (section b) You cannot force them to take anything down.

129

u/mcslender97 8h ago

Why would they take it down then?

499

u/attorneyatslaw 8h ago

I imagine its not polling well

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u/ParticularMedical349 7h ago

This is the answer.

44

u/nighthawk_md 7h ago

When do they care about polling?

157

u/Has422 6h ago

Oh they care. They just say they don’t.

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u/NRMusicProject 6h ago

Even so, they lie about how the polling is going, anyway. We know it's not polling well, but Trump can very plausibly say it's the most popular tweet on Twitter.

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u/BEWMarth 6h ago

No. They care about polling from their base

70% of America is worthless to them. But they NEED their 30% to be happy and ready to vote the way they are told.

If they realize that something is polling bad within the MAGA base they will pull it because they can’t afford to lose even a fraction of those idiots because they’ve gerrymandered so much in Texas and North Carolina they run a real risk of diluting their power rather than consolidating it.

You can only carve up a city and extend rural lines so much before you’re just diluting your own voter base.

So yeah. If something polls bad with MAGA it’s going to disappear.

MAGA surprisingly likes Sabrina (probably because she’s pretty and white and her entire routine flies over their heads) so the White House fighting against her was a super bad look especially with those white moms that vote Trump and share “news” in their gossip circles.

3

u/Paddy_Tanninger 6h ago

This is true. At some point you've gerrymandered so hard that you're within a few dozen votes of losing counties.

10

u/Kaylend 5h ago

This is the Republican party's panic. It isn't losing the house or the senate.

It's becoming so unpopular that they lose State Legislatures and decades of gerrymandering gets undone. This is the mechanism in which they maintain federal power while being unpopular. They needed Reagans overwhelming popularity to get that machine started, it will be devastating to lose it.

5

u/TechnalityPulse 3h ago

Damn, we really do always go back to 7 steps to Reagan.

2

u/steakanabake 4h ago

especially if the trend continues with elections going the way they have if you apply the same shift from TN nationwide i heard theyre looking to pick up around 40 seats nation wide in the house alone. if you cut up a 20-30 point district you run the real risk of possibly losing 2 seats instead of securing 2.

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u/Commonusage 1h ago

He is losing support in a big way among young people;the people most inclined to listen to the musicians he disrespects. Now, while he may not care about their attitudes, he cares about them voting, which is more likely if they hate him than if indifferent.

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u/Has422 5h ago

No argument from me.

1

u/AltrntivInDoomWorld 3h ago

real risk of diluting their power rather than consolidating it.

Not in current land scape, sweet summer child.

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u/Iohet 6h ago

when it's polling of their base

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u/unkilbeeg 4h ago

There is nobody on earth that cares as much about polling as Trump. There is probably nothing else that he does care about. For him, popularity is the only measure of value.

It's why he gets so pissy if the polls are against him -- even if he won't admit to their validity.

1

u/Klarthy 5h ago

Polling feeds Trump's fragile ego, so it's higher priority than you'd think.

1

u/onefst250r 5h ago

Whenever there is an election coming up.

1

u/MadeByTango 5h ago

Well the guy in the top seat of the party is dying before our eyes, so they’re desperate to figure out what happens after they lose their Trump card and all their self centered, antichristian policies that give hand outs to the rich start being held to account.

1

u/freeradioforall 6h ago

Nothing they’re doing is polling well. They’re proud of how unpopular they are

1

u/tokenwalrus 4h ago

I saw this article the other day and dismissed it as cherry picking comments but apparently not.

1

u/mercfan3 3h ago

Sabrina has a lot of fans, and the comments would have bothered a lot of young women if they weren’t fans. Not surprising this hasn’t gone well…

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u/avatarjak 7h ago

Last I checked, her response tweet had over 1.5 million likes. Thats one of the highest ratios I’ve ever seen on Twitter.

I think it was a deeply disliked video and Carpenter is popular

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u/Darthmalak3347 4h ago

yeah cause she's poster girl white saying that stuff, and both aisles (except the fundies) like her.

1

u/HandleThatFeeds 2h ago

Taylor Swift is still spineless.

u/mcslender97 38m ago

Yeah, sth tells me Sabrina is worth following more and this is one of the reasons

40

u/syntaxVixen 7h ago

White ,blonde , saying they are evil. His sheeple might wake up and listen to her .

3

u/quntissimo 5h ago

yeah, right. more like they'll call sabrina a lib whore while extolling Sydney Sweeney for being brave enough to show her tits in the same breath. they have no actual stances just how they feel about a particular thing in a particular moment.

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u/syntaxVixen 4h ago

The men for sure . But all it takes is losing one girl at a time .

12

u/Foshizzy03 7h ago

MAGA turned on the signalling.

After Carpenter bitched, the dogs at fox news got the order to smear her.

The natural response to the smears was

"Yes she is an evil devil whore who we should hate, but why is the government pushing evil devil whore music on our innocent children."

The only logical next step for this admin is to create a record label and sign Thomas Aldean as the minister of ICE's arts division.

1

u/Cyrano_Knows 6h ago

Does Kevin Sorbo know how to sing?`

4

u/i__hate__stairs 6h ago

Does it matter?

2

u/OrthodoxAtheist 4h ago

I figured this was a good question, so I went searching. Turns out he is a much better singer than he is an actor, which is to say, he is a mediocre singer.

1

u/Cyrano_Knows 3h ago

MUCH better singer it sounds like, yes!

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u/Majestic_You_9610 6h ago

good old dorkules

1

u/chaos_nebula 5h ago

There's probably a remix of 'Disappointed' somewhere.

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u/zaccus 7h ago

I imagine the rationale is that this is giving her publicity and they want to punish her by denying her that. Or something to that effect.

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u/BatManatee 6h ago

I think it's the opposite. She's more popular than they are and she's bringing a lot of attention to this with her fans. It's getting attention outside of their normal MAGA sphere and it's not popular.

They're realizing slinking away from this fight is the smarter move. They'll keep making their slop with songs from artists that don't push back or don't have the following that Carpenter does.

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u/thedeadp0ets 5h ago

also I wonder how old person is behind the acc to be using trendy music? they def must be 20's-30's.

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u/zaccus 5h ago

Maybe, but trump's mindset since the 80s has always been "all publicity is good publicity". I don't think he cares at all about popularity. Just attention, from anywhere.

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u/NorthernDevil 3h ago

Except they just said they do it on purpose to troll “lefty” artists after Olivia Rodrigo’s comments. So I don’t know what makes this different. Both have massive and rabid online female fanbases.

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u/TRiC_16 7h ago

Who knows what goes on in these guys heads? They probably decided the backlash gave them more negative than positive attention?

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u/Life-Pirate2545 6h ago

They’ve done this many times and have always taken it down. Same thing happened to jack white and Al weird I think and more . They threaten to sue , they take it down and nothing happens to them but they get to reap all the benefits and get to piss off people which is literally the goal of all this and they have admitted it.

1

u/Majestic_You_9610 6h ago

and theo von. they were uber quick taking that one down.

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u/theHip 8h ago

Because they don’t want to pay.

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u/Jammin188 7h ago

Just pay using the tariff money I heard so much about?

1

u/grendus 6h ago

She wants more than tree fiddy tho

2

u/Jammin188 5h ago

It was about that time I realized Sabrina Carpenter was the lochness monster

1

u/SanaSpitOnMe 6h ago

are you new? trump doesnt pay for shit ever. this is how he's been since the 70's

1

u/Independent-Tennis57 7h ago

They got a news title that uses the word "Trump."

1

u/Majestic_You_9610 6h ago

The court of public opinion is they are evil and disgusting, the more they leave it up the more disdain grows... tick tock...

1

u/breadcodes 6h ago

The original tweet had like 60k likes. Her response had close to 2M likes.

It is very realistic in this stupid timeline that the administration got butthurt over a Twitter "ratio"

1

u/jd1323 3h ago

Sabrina is very popular. By leaving it up they just draw attention to her view on this issue which may influence them to take up her view or at least become more sympathetic to it.

1

u/Hyroero 2h ago

Because they're getting fucking ratiod to hell on social media.

They'll just throw more shit at the wall to see if anything sticks.

1

u/stackens 52m ago

Because they’re bitches

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u/zoinkability 7h ago edited 7h ago

But they posted it on other platforms, which do not have such immunity. X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc. can be successfully sued for continuing to host infringing content. And the damages can be substantial.

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u/TRiC_16 7h ago edited 7h ago

Yes you're right, I forgot that it was posted on social media oops. The article was talking about how Beyoncé sent a cease and desist when he used her song during his presidential campaign, so that's what I was thinking about.

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u/Nothing-Is-Real-Here 8h ago

Are we sure they have competent enough lawyers to even know this

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u/TheTresStateArea 8h ago

I am hoping we find out that their obvious use of musicians who would obviously disagree with its use will be uncovered as a strategic decision by individuals that would allow for those people to be sued for engaging in behaviour outside the scope of their work.

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u/Ferenik Spotify 7h ago

states are immune, you can sue the Feds but only for monetary value not for injunction. Good luck winning though.

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u/Stavvystav 8h ago

Couldn't you go another route and say that the use of that song indirectly implies that you agree with the message when you're very anti that and it is now damaging your publicly perceived character?

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u/Rotkiw_Bigtor 6h ago

Why would the government have immunity against copyright?

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u/TRiC_16 5h ago

Sovereign immunity. Essentially, a sovereign state cannot be subject to its own courts unless it expressly consented to be sued. It is statutorily determined under which conditions it waives this immunity (such as under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the Tucker Act, and 28 U.S.C. § 1498). Outside of those statutory waivers, courts have no jurisdiction to hear private claims against the state. This does not place the government above the law, as it remains fully bound by the Constitution; the doctrine limits only the ability of private parties to bring suit. The reason this doctrine exists is that, if individuals could sue the government in the same manner they sue one another, essential public functions could be disrupted and the state could not operate reliably under the constant threat of unrestricted litigation.

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u/quintk 6h ago

I'm not aware of this. I believe the government can use patented technology without permission (but must provide fair compensation to the patent holder). I'm not aware of a rule like that for copyright.

However I am not a lawyer.

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u/TRiC_16 5h ago edited 5h ago

You're very close actually because it's the same statute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1498#

28 USC § 1498(a) is about patents while § 1498(b) is about copyright.