After musician after musician pulled out from Trump’s June 24 “Freedom 250” concert, we’re left with Lee Greenwood and an opera tenor. The anthem that made Greenwood a star, “God Bless the USA,” was written in 1985 during the height of the Cold War. It begins with the specter of loss—“If tomorrow—all the things were gone, I’d worked for all my life / And I had to start all over with my children and my wife.” Then the wounds disappear before they’re felt: “I’d thank my lucky stars to be living here today / Because the flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away.”

Ronald Reagan made the song his campaign theme while launching a new age of American inequality by systematically busting unions and cutting taxes for the wealthiest. Greenwood treats layoffs and the resulting toll on ordinary lives as a mere inconvenience. As the refrain shifts from violins and a church organ to a military march, he repeats, “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free / And I won’t forget the men who died who gave that right to me.”