Lara Trump, Bad Singer, Insists Her Tom Petty Cover Is Getting Shadow Banned

What does one do when Tom Petty, singer of “I Won’t Back Down,” asks you and your family to stop using his song at campaign rallies because he emphatically does not support the abhorrent bullshit you all stand for? Well, one option is to, ahem, not back down.

Lara Trump, wife of a man who always looks like he’s sniffed a little bit of poo (Eric Trump), recently released a cover of Petty’s 1989 hit. It’s unclear why but perhaps it was meant to be a workaround to Petty’s family demanding that Trump and his cronies stop playing his song—because now it is in a way, unfortunately, her song, too. After Trump used Petty’s song in 2020, Petty’s family released a statement saying, “Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate.”

Or perhaps she is doing so because she has music in her heart? Unfortunately (and hilariously), Lara is now realizing that a Petty song does not the level of Petty fame make.

The song, if you can believe it, did not reach meteoric levels of fame and now Lara is accusing Apple of shadow-banning her and her music. The day it was released she tweeted at Apple, “where is my song??? Why doesn’t my song appear when you search ‘I Won’t Back Down’???” I shouldn’t expect any differently from a Trump, but it’s certainly an overblown sense of confidence for a woman who occasionally posts middling piano-playing videos on her Instagram.

On Thursday night, on The Sean Hannity Show, she also complained about a company that wouldn’t include her last name on a Times Square billboard.

“This is the kind of treatment that I think conservatives are used to. We’re used to being censored. We’re used to being shadow-banned. I already know my song was shadow-banned, so many people told me, on Apple Music, on Spotify, on Amazon Music. They wouldn’t put my song on the radio because it was too political.”

Never one to not chime into the brouhaha, Eric Trump tweeted and subsequently deleted, “Apple appears to be viscously shadow banning [Lara’s] new song, which immediately upon release, was 31st on the iTunes charts. Lara’s name, when typed in full, is hardly viable and can only be found below ‘Fake News II.’ The song itself is unsearchable.”

For what it’s worth, I typed “Lara Trump I Won’t Back Down” into Spotify and the Chanel pink and black cover art of her riding a horse with a bejeweled festival headband popped up immediately. I’d say go ahead and listen to it if you want to hear a bad cover of a classic song. But if you really want a treat, I’d highly recommend listening to her singing un-produced and a cappella on Sky News Australia. It might reveal a few more reasons why her song isn’t being given air time. But yes, sure, censorship!