Why is everyone you know suddenly listening to a terrible five-year-old pop song about a failed romance? Ask Donald Trump Jr.
“DJT,” a song featured on singer Aubrey O’Day’s 2013 album “Between Two Evils,” is steadily gaining new listeners as rumors of an alleged affair between O’Day and Trump, who recently announced his split from Vanessa Trump after 12 years of marriage, gained traction this week.
Us Weekly and Page Six reported that the two engaged in an affair in 2011. The liaison reportedly began while O’Day, formerly of MTV’s “Making the Band 3,” was a competitor, and Trump an “adviser,” on Season 5 of NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” the show that helped cement the Trump family brand. Sources close to O’Day told Us Weekly that the singer and the businessman dated for a few months. Trump, now 40, whose wife Vanessa was then pregnant with the couple’s fourth child (they now have a total of five), called off the affair with O’Day, now 34, according to reports, after Vanessa discovered emails between the two.
But back to the song.
First, that title: “DJT.” While “DJTJ” would have been slightly more accurate, the letters “DJT” are coincidentally Donald John Trump Jr.’s initials. And then, of course, there are the actual lyrics. The song — which was written by James Eugene Roston, Adam Gann Waldman and “unknown,” according to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers — describes the kind of tumultuous and undefinable relationships that high school dramas are made of.
“Whatever the truth is defines the reality of you and I forever/And I need to be able to define that before I can walk away/I thought it was forever at the time but maybe I was lying to myself.”
O’Day toggles between breathy confessionals and actual singing throughout the three-minute track. It kicks off with a tortured conversation between the singer and the object of her affection/angst.
“You can say it was all a f—ing fairy tale or you can say it was real, but I need to know. And you know,” O’Day says.
A man answers: “I thought it was forever at the time, but maybe I was lying to myself.”
If there’s a hook in this electro-pop voyeurism, it’s the repeated line, “I hate me for loving you, hate you for letting our love die.”
Trump and O’Day have yet to confirm or deny their alleged relationship; neither responded to requests for comment. But the timing of the song (released a year after their alleged breakup) and its on-the-nose lyrics seem coincidental to say the least. O’Day added more fuel to the fire a few years later when she took to Twitter on Election Day in 2016 to express her frustration with the results. When a user pointed out that she was on one of Trump’s shows and insinuated that she was mad because “the checks stopped coming,” O’Day responded in part in a since-deleted tweet: “my story I didn’t tell is worth millions now.”
While she’s largely remained out of the spotlight recently, there was a time when O’Day was definitely B-list. She was initially discovered on the third iteration of rapper-actor-producer Sean “Diddy” Combs’s MTV reality series about creating new musical groups. Diddy oversaw the band’s formation and, in 2006, selected O’Day to be the lead of girl group Danity Kane.
Danity Kane’s first two albums each debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and the group is best remembered for their hit singles “Show Stopper” and “Damaged.” O’Day and another member were fired from the group in 2008, and the rest of Danity Kane fell apart the following year. Danity Kane announced their reunion at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, only to break up in 2014 after O’Day alleged that she had been punched by bandmate Dawn Richards.
Now, less than a week after announcing his split from wife Vanessa Trump, it seems Donald Trump Jr. has sparked renewed interest in O’Day’s music career.
Sonia Rao contributed to this report.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
