Kid Rock’s performance at the fourth and final night of the Republican National Convention was met with swift and mostly mortified responses. Media Matters’ Andrew Lawrence joked that the performance might be indicative of a miscalculation on behalf of the RNC.
He tweeted, “Ok, watching kid rock scream sing in prime time at the rnc and im beginning to think that republicans may be a bit over confident.”
Writer Brandon Halsey summed it up, “So ….. Kid Rock just made a bunch of 75 year olds pump their fists in the air, yelling ‘fight.’ That just happened in 2024’s America. Embarrassing.”
Therapist Ken Theroux noted the surreality of the performance itself. “Imagine telling 2004 Republicans that Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock would headline Donald Trumps third nomination 5 days after he got shot in the ear,” he wrote on X.
One person likened Kid Rock’s performance to that of Ingrid Andress, who checked herself into rehab earlier this week after she performed the national anthem while drunk ahead of a baseball game.
X user @TheUrbanMonk321 made an apt comparison between Kid Rock and David Spade’s character Joe Dirt from the 2001 film by the same name. “Kid Rock looks like the guy that sells Bowie knives at the swap meet.I’mma tell my kids this is kid rock,” they wrote on the platform.
For others, the quality of the singer’s performance was nothing exceptional. As one person wrote on X, “I saw Kid Rock at an all day festival in 1999 by a local Alt Rock Radio station. It was a stage at the back wall of center field. The rest of the field was concert goers. He opened up w/ his bawitdabaw and then everyone sat down waiting for Incubus. It was bad then. Bad now.”
CNN’s Abby D. Phillips might have put it best when she tweeted simply, “This is… something.”
Kid Rock performed his song “American Bad Ass” with the lyrics amended to support Trump. Throughout the song, the singer chanted, “Fight, fight” — a reference to the July 13 shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, where the former president mouthed the same words to the crowd.
Earlier on Thursday the singer, who was not on the list of speakers for the night, announced he had arrived in Milwaukee ahead of the convention. In a video that featured the singer in a National Rifle Association cap, he teased in part, “We just arrived in Milwaukee to support our tried and true, red, white and blue, 100 percent American bada‑‑ president. What’s (going to) happen tonight? Tune in to find out. But here’s a hint — are you scared?”
The Hill later reported the singer was seen rehearsing at Fiserv Forum.
