Donald Trump apparently has a thing for all things Norwegian. The feeling isn’t mutual.
On Monday night, Trump tweeted out a corny video that depicts the president as a pencil-drawn animation having his hair tussled, dancing and hugging the U.S. flag.
It didn’t take long for Twitter to spot the clip’s close resemblance to A-ha’s iconic 1985 music video for “Take On Me.” As it turns out, the band agrees.
“The video for our song ‘take on me’ seems to have inspired @realDonaldTrump to make his tie-advert, but then he in turn inspired me to write this,” reads a statement from Magne Furuholmen founding member and keyboardist with the Norwegian pop trio.
magne says; ‘the video for our song ‘take on me’ seems to have inspired @realDonaldTrump to make his tie-advert, but then he in turn inspired me to write this: https://t.co/vn0vAxGFN9 #takeonme #thisisnowamerica
— a-ha (@aha_com) October 1, 2019
His response? A protest song, bereft of the optimism of the Trump-approved Keep America Great advertisement.
Trending on Billboard
Furuholmen, the muso behind the famous“Take On Me” riff, wrote “This is Now America,” the video for which was shot by his son, Thomas Vincent Furuholmen, and uploaded to YouTube in late August.
On it, he sings: “This is Now America, This is now America/Oh how little we have learnt/ This is Now America, This is Now America/is there no way to turn.”
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the artist says he was made aware of the clip as it was going viral. When asked his thoughts on Trump borrowing the rotoscoped look of A-ha’s classic clip, Furuholmen remarked: “Even blind pigs can find truffles.”
He added, “We didn’t intend to make our music part of a divisive campaign and, all things equal, would have preferred it not to have been.”
Furuholmen and his bandmates Morten Harket and Paul Waaktaar-Savoy will perform “Take On Me” and the rest of their debut album Hunting High and Low on a 15-date pan-European tour, kicking off Oct. 29 in Dublin.
The group will also tour Australia during the southern summer for their first shows Down Under since the late 1980s.