As someone who has covered way too many presidential campaign rallies, I can attest that popular music at political gatherings is a powerful mood enhancer.

I will never forget one of then-President Obama’s last campaign rallies of 2012, in a crowded University of Cincinnati gym on election eve. The already pumped-up crowd erupted when they realized that “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” wasn’t being piped in; it was being sung live by Stevie Wonder himself. The song was something of a premature victory lap: Obama appeared to be in a tight race against Mitt Romney, though he ended up beating the former Massachusetts governor decisively.

Ever since our first baby boomer president, Bill Clinton, adopted Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” as his campaign theme song in 1992 — even inspiring the band to regroup for his inauguration — candidates have increasingly used popular music to send a message.

Some songs are less subtle than others. During her 2016 bid to make history as the first female president, Hillary Clinton adopted Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song.”

Former President Trump, whose performative patriotism can be boiled down to a single four-letter acronym, MAGA, chose Lee Greenwood’s signature song, “God Bless the U.S.A.,” as his jingle.

And Vice President Kamala Harris has famously made Beyoncé’s “Freedom” her campaign anthem.

While the music playing at political rallies has never struck me as signifying the artist’s endorsement of a particular candidate, musicians can be furious when their music is used without permission. Either they don’t want their work associated with politics at all, or they loathe the candidate who is playing it.

Which brings us back to Trump.

The list of artists who have demanded that he stop using their songs is long, ranging from ABBA and Adele to the Village People and the White Stripes.

I counted at least 41 artists who have tried to forbid him from using their tunes, including the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Queen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, the Foo Fighters, and Bruce Springsteen, who endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 after calling on Trump to stop playing “Born in the U.S.A.”

Celine Dion condemned Trump’s campaign for playing her mega-hit “My Heart Will Go On” last month during a rally with his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. It was a peculiar choice of music because, as everyone knows, the song was the theme for a movie about a giant passenger liner that famously hit an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

“In no way is this use authorized,” said a post on Dion’s official X feed. “… And really, THAT song?”

Also last month, the family of the late R&B singer, songwriter and producer Isaac Hayes filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Trump, his campaign and the Republican National Committee for using the 1966 Sam & Dave hit “Hold On, I’m Coming” at rallies all over the country. Hayes co-wrote the song with David Porter.

On Tuesday, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction forbidding Trump from using the song.

Trump’s attorneys claim the Hayes family no longer owns the rights to the song and that, in any case, something called a “political campaign license agreement” allows the music rights management organization BMI, which has more than 22 million songs in its catalog, to use music for political events.

There is a clause in the agreement, however, that allows BMI to exclude certain music if a songwriter or publisher asks the organization to withhold it. For example, the Rolling Stones were unhappy that Trump used “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as his walk-off music in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. They sent cease-and-desist letters to no avail and then turned to BMI for help and explicitly threatened to sue. “If Donald Trump disregards the exclusion and persists,” the Stones said in a June 2020 statement, “then he would face a lawsuit for breaking the embargo and playing music that has not been licensed.”

Trump has not played the song since.

The current flap over “Hold On” is not the first. In 2008, the Obama campaign stopped using “Hold On” after Sam Moore of Sam & Dave objected. “No one called me, no one sent a telegraph, no one did anything,” Moore told the Associated Press. “They just did it, and I think that’s rather rude.”

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who ran for president against Obama in 2008, wryly turned a band’s potential rejection into a joke. Trying to woo conservative Republicans who disliked his moderate stances on some issues, he thought about using ABBA’s 1978 hit “Take a Chance on Me,” but worried about being unable to secure the Swedish band’s permission.

“If you’re not careful, you can alienate some Swedes,” McCain told reporters during one of the many off-the-cuff conversations he had with his traveling press corps. “If word gets out to Stockholm that we’re using ABBA music, then there’ll be a worsening in U.S.-Swedish relations.”

If only Trump were so considerate.

@robinkabcarian

Jury selection in Hunter Biden’s criminal tax trial stemming from special counsel David Weiss’ yearslong investigation into the first son begins Thursday in California. 

United States District Court for the Central District of California Judge Mark Scarsi is presiding over the trial. 

Biden’s tax trial was set to begin in June, but his attorneys requested it be delayed to September, and Scarsi approved that request.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS REFER HUNTER BIDEN, JAMES BIDEN FOR CRIMINAL PROSECUTION AMID IMPEACHMENT INQUIRY

Weiss charged Hunter Biden with three felonies and six misdemeanors concerning $1.4 million in owed taxes that have since been paid. Weiss alleged a “four-year scheme” when the president’s son did not pay his federal income taxes while also filing false tax reports. 

Biden pleaded not guilty. 

In the indictment, Weiss alleged that Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019, from in or about January 2017 through in or about October 15, 2020, and to evade the assessment of taxes for tax year 2018 when he filed false returns in or about February 2020.”

Weiss said that, in “furtherance of that scheme,” Biden “subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company, Owasco, PC by withdrawing millions” from the company “outside of the payroll and tax withholding process that it was designed to perform.”

HUNTER BIDEN TAX TRIAL POSTPONED TO SEPTEMBER

The special counsel alleged that Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills,” and that in 2018, he “stopped paying his outstanding and overdue taxes for tax year 2015.”

Special counsel David Weiss charged Hunter Biden with three felonies and six misdemeanors concerning $1.4 million in owed taxes that have since been paid. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Weiss alleged that Biden “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes,” and that he “willfully failed to file his 2017 and 2018 tax returns on time.”

This is the second time Biden is on trial this year stemming from charges out of Weiss’ investigation. 

Biden was found guilty on all counts in Delaware after Weiss charged him with making a false statement during the purchase of a firearm; making a false statement related to information required to be kept by a licensed firearm dealer; and one count of possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance. 

Hunter Biden looks on during the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago on Monday, Aug. 19, 2024. (Getty Images)

A date has not yet been set for sentencing for those charges. With all counts combined, the total maximum prison time for the charges could be up to 25 years. Each count carries a maximum fine of $250,000 and three years of supervised release. 

President Biden has vowed not to pardon his son. 

Jury selection in California is expected to take place Thursday and Friday. Weiss and Biden’s defense attorneys are expected to deliver their opening arguments the following Monday.

Kamala Harris has had a strong start to her presidential campaign, but the remaining weeks leading up to the Nov. 5 election will be closely contested and Harris faces real obstacles.

She must articulate her own positions to separate her candidacy from some of the less popular policies and outcomes seen during the Biden-Harris administration. And as she fills in the details, her plans will be picked apart, diminishing her chances to sway voters in the swing states that will decide the 2024 election.

In important policy areas, Harris has undergone an almost complete transformation, switching from unabashed progressive to careful centrist. Some voters will question the authenticity of her revised views. But for others, inconsistency won’t be the problem. It’s the policies themselves — appealing at first but ineffective, challenging to implement or more progressive than most Americans are comfortable with. It’s policy, therefore, that could prove to be the Achilles’ heel in Harris’ efforts to keep Trump from a second term.

In her first extensive media interview since becoming the Democrats’ 2024 standard-bearer, Harris argued that voters should be comfortable with her reversals because her “values” have not changed. Maybe so, but voters will wonder what her values could cause her to do once elected.

On domestic energy exploration, Harris has gone from saying in 2019 that she opposed fracking and offshore oil drilling to noting that she would not seek to ban fracking after all. On healthcare that same year, the then-presidential primary candidate was an ardent supporter of Medicare for All, a reform to institute a government-run system that would significantly disrupt existing coverage arrangements. But a campaign spokesman recently said that she no longer favors this plan.

Similarly, on immigration policy — a topic that voters earlier this year in a Wall Street Journal survey identified as their 2024 top issue — Harris has struck an aggressive tone and changed positions on the Trump border wall, embracing the recent bipartisan border security bill that includes $650 million in funding for the wall, while walking away from her previous support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

In other issue areas, it’s simply the weaknesses in the ideas she’s proposed that will dog her. This is particularly the case with some of her economic policy proposals.

Her housing plans, for example, include an idea that sounds appealing at first: providing $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers, as well as an additional $10,000 tax credit for purchasing a home. Such a plan would increase demand for new homes but, without significant additional supply, would also likely increase home prices for those it intends to help and potentially others in the market for a new home as well. (It’s worth noting that Harris has also proposed incentives for developers who build starter homes, as well as making it possible to build new affordable housing on federal lands. But in supply-constrained states like California, these proposals alone may not create sufficient inventory to lower prices.)

Harris has conceded that food prices still remain far too high for too many Americans, but her solution — a federal ban on price-gouging — has been panned by even some progressive economists as counterproductive to encouraging the macroeconomic trends that would bring down prices. Her plan would do nothing to change the factors that drive up food prices — supply chain challenges, geopolitical conflicts and high energy costs to name a few — and it’s unclear that a president would be able to do much, if anything, to address these root causes, in any case.

Then there’s the fact that lawmakers from her own party have said that Harris’ price-gouging idea wouldn’t pass Congress, even if Democrats win a majority in both chambers, and would be difficult to implement as well. It’s also a lightning rod for opposition from conservatives who can easily equate it to the price controls seen in some economies around the world.

Finally, there are Harris’ proposed $5 trillion in tax increases.

She’s called for raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, after Congress enacted the lower rate and Trump signed it into law in 2017. But this would only serve to restore incentives for companies to locate elsewhere to avoid paying the higher rates.

Perhaps most controversial is the Harris plan to create a new wealth tax, which would require some high net-worth families to pay taxes each year on the value of their assets, even if they remain unsold. The taxation of what are known as unrealized capital gains is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which are the administrative challenges in collecting the tax and the issues created by trying to accurately value assets that fluctuate over time or aren’t publicly traded.

For most voters in most states, the policy proposals of either presidential candidate won’t matter. They’ve made up their minds. But for the few remaining undecided voters in swing states, what Harris has proposed and how she defends and explains her future policies may very well be dispositive. To secure their support, she’ll have to hope that these Americans forgive the inconsistencies in her record and the deficiencies in what she’s proposed thus far.

Lanhee J. Chen is the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution. He was a candidate for California state controller in 2022 and served as policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.