“We stand up for our brothers and sisters in Minnesota,” Billie Joe Armstrong said during the band’s performance of “Holiday”
Green Day stood up for the people of Minnesota amid the ongoing ICE crackdown and called out Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement mastermind, Stephen Miller, during a performance in California over the weekend.
During a short instrumental break in the middle of American Idiot favorite “Holiday” — a song originally written about George W. Bush and the Iraq War — frontman Billie Joe Armstrong bellowed, “This song is anti-fascism. This song is anti-war. We stand up for our brothers and sisters in Minnesota.”
Then, before launching into the song’s sycophantic and jingoistic interlude monologue, Armstrong sneered, “Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Miller now has the floor.” (The speech, which is “delivered by” an unnamed representative of California in the original song, begins with the lines, “Sieg Heil to the President Gasman/Bombs away is your punishment.”)
This is, of course, far from the first time Green Day have called out the Trump administration. They’ve consistently changed the “American Idiot” lyric “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of a MAGA agenda.” And last year, the band changed the lyrics to “Jesus of Suburbia” to skewer Vice President at a gig in Australia. A few months later, in Belgium, Armstrong led a chant of “fuck Donald Trump” during “Holiday.”
Green Day’s performance over the weekend was part of the iHeartRadio ALTer Ego festival in Los Angeles. After spending much of 2025 on the road in support of their 2024 album Saviors, the band has just a pair of gigs scheduled at the moment, both around Super Bowl 60, which is taking place outside San Francisco. They’ll perform at the big game’s opening ceremony on Feb. 8, while a couple of days prior, they’ll play in San Francisco with Counting Crows.
