The White House is pushing back after John Mellencamp publicly ridiculed President Donald Trump’s move to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Mellencamp stopped during his Saturday night concert in Holmdel, N.J., to take a jab at Trump’s executive order renaming the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America.”
On Monday, White House spokesman Davis Ingle responded in a statement to Fox News Digital. “Nobody in their right mind cares what out-of-touch, woke Hollywood celebrities have to say,” Ingle said.
The moment came during a stop on Mellencamp’s “Dancing Words” Tour, as the rock veteran began performing the opening verses of his 1983 hit “Pink Houses.”
“Well, there’s people and more people/ What do they know, know, know?/ Go to work in some high rise/ And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico,” Mellencamp sang, before abruptly cutting in with, “Wait a minute,” according to USA Today.
As his band continued playing behind him, Mellencamp leaned into the moment with sarcasm. “The Gulf of Mexico? Is that right? It’s not the Gulf of America? What a stupid f–—-g idea,” he said.
After the brief aside, Mellencamp returned to the song and finished “Pink Houses” for the crowd.
“Pink Houses,” released in 1983, remains one of Mellencamp’s best-known songs and climbed to No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
While many listeners initially embraced it as a patriotic anthem, Mellencamp has said the song is actually a sharp commentary on the American dream, exploring themes of class, inequality and the gap between ideals and reality.
The song was inspired by Mellencamp spotting a man sitting outside a small pink house along an Indiana highway, an image that sparked the iconic chorus, “Ain’t that America.”
