It’s no surprise that three months after ridding the country of Donald Trump, people are still trying to get the bad taste out of their mouth. Gargle Clorox, perhaps? Even actor Macaulay Culkin tweeted his support earlier this year when a Twitter user removed the twice-impeached president’s cameo from the 1992 sequel Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
Democratic Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro topped that by thinking toward the future and preparing legislation that would “prohibit any federal building or property from being named after President Donald J. Trump” once he leaves office.
During an interview with Variety for its cover story last week, Broadway superstar Lin-Manuel Miranda joined the many Trump critics who want to scrub his name from existence. He told the magazine that he removed Trump’s name from a lyric in the song “96,000” from his play In the Heights for the film adaptation, which hits theaters and HBO Max June 11.
The original lyric, which is part of a song that explains how much money someone in the Washington Heights neighborhood won playing the lottery, says: “I’ll be a businessman richer than Nina’s daddy/Donald Trump and I on the links, and he’s my caddie!”
For the film version, Miranda replaced Donald Trump with Tiger Woods. We guess Chi-Chi Rodriguez had too many syllables.
“When I wrote it, [Trump] was an avatar for the Monopoly man,” Miranda told Variety. “He was just, like, a famous rich person. Then when time moves on and he becomes the stain on American democracy, you change the lyric. Time made a fool of that lyric, and so we changed it.”
With the amount of joy a film like In the Heights delivers, it was the right decision.