Pete Hegseth and the rest of the Trump administration can't get enough of their biggest cheerleader in music

Kid Rock’s bizarre, multi-part saga with U.S. Army helicopters took another turn on Friday. The singer premiered a promo video at the first date on his new concert tour for the America 250 celebrations, featuring himself stepping out of a private jet before hitching a ride to the show in Dallas in a military helicopter with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Rock’s helicopter whirligig started back in late March, when a brief flyby of his Tennessee residence caused a brief investigation into the aviators responsible. That investigation, which began at the nearby 101st Airborne post at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and ended abruptly when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth swept in and cleared the pilots of all responsibility for their several-minute joyride past Rock’s “Southern White House” home. The two pilots were briefly suspended before Hegseth’s intervention. In April, Hegseth went a step further, welcoming Rock onto an AH-64 Apache helicopter during a visit to Virginia’s Fort Belvoir. While Rock’s repeated interactions with attack helicopters may have gone down as a fleeting obsession, it appears to have had an actual end result: a roughly 115-second trailer for Rock’s concert tour. 

The singer was asked by Fox News earlier on Friday about criticism that he’s getting perks from the government. He responded by bashing the “cackling crows on The View” before implying that he deserves the perks because he’s visited the troops, where as the troops wouldn’t be interested in the host of The View. “It’s just noise,” he added of the criticism.

Put aside the frustration inherent in watching tax dollars go to waste pumping up a geriatric pop-country star’s jingoism-laced publicity tour. AH-64 Apaches only cost around $7,000 per hour to fly, which in the grand scheme of the U.S. military budget is not so much a drop in the bucket as a grain of sand in the Sahara. More noteworthy is the chummy cronyism on display between Kid Rock and Pete Hegseth. The Trump administration has always been desperate for cultural allies, and if Kid Rock is the best they can do, they might not exactly be winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people. But that doesn’t stop them from trying, and Kid Rock’s tour promo could in some ways be a beacon to other artists: Look at the access and favor we’ll grant you if you toe the party line. 

What’s rare, though, is any mainstream cultural figures actually being convinced. For years now, Kid Rock has been about as good as the Trump administration could get. Look at the dueling halftime shows, for instance. Billed as an alternative to the sacrilegious act of casting a Puerto Rican for the actual Super Bowl, Rock’s Turning Point USA-sponsored “All American Halftime Show” was a lackluster flop that failed to entertain even some of the most fervent supporters of an America First agenda. Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic livestreamer who has gained the ear of a generation of young conservatives, was blunt about it: “I was watching that and just felt, like, depressed,” Fuentes said on his show on Rumble. “If this is the best we have to offer I think everybody’s going to go with Latino futurism.”

And yet, here we are: flying the “American Badass” around on helicopters so that he can pump up his concert crowds. If Kid Rock is satisfied with this as the main cultural output of his sundown years, good for him. It’s pretty clear that the country — and every American who puts even a fraction of a cent in taxes into an attack helicopter’s flight budget — deserves better than this.