More than half of the artists originally announced for the Trump White House’s “Great American State Fair” concerts in Washington D.C. over the next few weeks have now dropped out, Variety reports, as former Poison singer/official Celebrity Apprentice Bret Michaels has just joined the growing host of dropouts. Michaels broke the news in a long post on Instagram this weekend, including claims that he’s worried about unspecified “threats” and “safety concerns” about the show.
In many respects, Michaels’ post lines up with those of artists like Young MC, Martina McBride, and Morris Day, all of whom suggested, in one way or another, that they had no idea they were walking into a political minefield when they agreed to the shows, organized by the White House’s Freedom 250 task force to celebrate America’s upcoming 250th birthday. “Unfortunately, what was presented to us as a celebration of our country has evolved into something much more divisive than what I agreed to be a part of,” Michaels wrote. But then he gets into the more nebulous stuff, stating that, “Concerns have also been raised regarding the safety of my fans, band, crew, family and myself, including threats that are completely unfounded and unforgivable. Because of that, I have made the difficult decision to step away from this performance.”
Michaels didn’t go into detail about the “threats and safety concerns” in question, simply stating that he hoped to return to Washington D.C. “under circumstances where the focus can remain on where it should be—the music and the fans.”
Trump himself, meanwhile, seems to be getting just a tad frustrated that artists are bailing on him quite so quickly: He posted on Truth Social—your one-stop shop for public statements of policy from the American executive and also like 8,000 ads for sciatica pain—in order to admit that some artists are getting “the yips” about performing in the shows, going so far as to suggest that he might just turn the whole thing into a big rally speech, instead. Which will presumably be a big bummer for Vanilla Ice, who gave a stirring defense of not giving a fuck about whohe plays for in a TMZ interview on Friday. “I don’t even vote, so I don’t even care,” Ice said, noting with the happy indifference of a man whose mind remains trapped in 1992 even as his body careens haphazardly through the 2020s, that he’d be just as happy to play for Joe Biden, or, uh, other fans: “I’d go play. It’s not a big thing. You play for your fans. You know, we don’t get a chance to pick our fans. They pick us. And I’ll go play for Putin and I’ll play in Iran if you want. It don’t matter.”
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