TrumpCard’s logo exemplifies the band’s “shock and awe” tactics.

They’ve alarmed parents. They’ve received threats from the far-right and pushback from the left. They know they will offend people, and they just keep playing. How punk rock can you get?

TrumpCard is a Central Texas punk band openly mocking Donald Trump and his followers. The band uses sneering theatricality as a tactic to break through people’s complacency; as lead singer Bill Skinner has said at shows, “Don’t be the sheep, be the f***ing wolf.” On stage, Skinner becomes SCROTUS (So-Called Ruler of the United States), with slicked-back hair and dressed in a suit and tie and devil horns. The rest of the band is decked out in brown shirts and armbands with the letter “T” in a circle so the white space around them forms a swastika. Gruber is in clown makeup that includes a dollar sign on his forehead. At each show, before the music starts, SCROTUS takes an oath on a copy of “The Art of the Deal.” 

“People thought we were going overboard with the imagery at first,” Skinner says, “but then there was Charlottesville with the guys in polo shirts chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’  and running over Heather Heyer.” 

“The world we live in … people are brainwashed,” says Adam “Atom von” Arndt, aka hype clown Hans P. Gruber. “You can’t tap people on the shoulder – you have to hit them with a sledgehammer.”

Matt Miller (aka Nacho, one of the band’s guitarists) says the world is starting to more closely resemble Mike Judge’s social satire “Idiocracy,” which was partly shot in San Marcos. 

“I’m waiting for ‘Ow, My Balls’ to come out,” he says. “Everything keeps getting dumber and dumber.”

“These last 8 years have been the slow-boiling-frog analogy,” Skinner says of the American socio-political landscape. “We have grown accustomed to the batshit nonsensical Orwelian speak so much that the political scenario more resembles a Huxleyan dystopia. We have become numb, disconnected, and indifferent. ‘I’ve got my 5G, IPA, and crunchwrap.’”

TrumpCard has written songs responding to political events, like “Let’s Go Camping” (after a Trump administration official compared migrant family detention centers to summer camps) and “Hangin’ With Jeff” (written after Jeffrey Epstein’s death by hanging in his jail cell). The band has released two albums, created a Bandcamp profile to sell their music, and posted music videos on the band’s YouTube channel. And as the 2024 campaign season ramps up, so does TrumpCard’s agenda.

“The plan right now is to get our shit together to put out a new album and play shows,” Skinner says. “We are getting there, but it is a slow ascent. We should really be playing shows again in the spring.”

Origins and Reactions

Skinner says TrumpCard started in a conversation in 2016 with Izzy D. Showman (stage name for Isaac Gonzales), lead singer of local band Blackwater Revival. Although Gonzales isn’t in TrumpCard now, Skinner says he was vital to the band’s beginning and to the songwriting for the band’s first album, “Use Your Collusion.”

“The parody was point one. The punk was point two,” Skinner says. “The ideas flowed quickly and we started for a couple months with a lineup that really didn’t work. It wasn’t until we solidified the Blackwater Revival trio [Gonzales and his bandmates joined TrumpCard] plus myself and Adam that it really started to move forward.”

TrumpCard began playing small gigs in San Marcos, including frequent shows at the now-defunct Buzzmill, and gained a following in Austin and San Antonio. The band has also played political events, including a women’s march at the State Capitol and a get-out-the-vote event. In 2020, the band released its second album, “Cult 45.” 

“It’s interesting that I still don’t feel like we’ve really played many venues,” Skinner says. Every time we play a new venue, we get the side looks and grumbling until we actually start the show. The reception is an individual thing. Some love it. Some don’t get it. Some get it and hate it. One thing that has always been concerning for me is that venues and bookers make their own judgment calls before they even do any research.”

Skinner says some venues have cut power to the stage during gigs, and he has received threats from Trump sympathizers. And Miller’s wife Rebecca says there was one show where the crowd cheered for the band because they thought TrumpCard was genuinely pro-Trump. “There are times it’s scary,” says Rob Kennedy (aka Von Clapp, the band’s drummer).

Arndt says the band gets more resistance from liberals, whose side they’re on. He even recites a disclaimer before shows – though his delivery is a bit unhinged – to tell audiences that the show is parody. 

“There’s a clown dressed as a Nazi – you’d think people would realize it’s a joke,” Skinner says.

But within the band, there’s a lot of love – for each other, for what TrumpCard does, and for how they do it.

Miller, the TrumpCard guitarist with the longest tenure, says he’s in the band because, “My high school friends are in this band. … And to spread dissent among the masses.” Christopher “Pickles” Lamon (aka Rasputin) is TrumpCard’s newest member and ninth guitarist. Lamon says he’s known the band for years, and when he heard they were looking for another guitarist, he asked Skinner’s wife Vanessa, “Would you just tell Bill I’m in the band?”

Lamon says he has theater experience, including in a “Rocky Horror” troupe, and TrumpCard appeals to that side of him. 

“It’s musical theater,” he says, “and it’s a lot of fun.”

Kennedy has been in the band from the start and has seen the drama and chaos the band has gone through, but it’s worth it. 

“Adam has been my lifelong brother,” he says. “I got in because of Adam … and the shitshow that was going on in the world.” (Skinner chimes in: “Was?”) “It’s insane, but it’s better than waiting around to die,” he says. 

Sandra Gloystein (aka Chosen) plays bass with the band and “screams sometimes,” she says. “I love the energy,” Gloystein says. “It’s a theatrical experience. … A band of brothers is really what it is to me.”

More than that, she respects the band’s mission of waking people up to the current political reality. “If you keep people divided,” she says, “we can’t unite for change.”

Among the band’s new songs are “Boogaloo,” about the Jan. 6 rioters; “Cruzin,” which Skinner says is about Ted Cruz; “Repeat It,” about being doomed to relive mistakes if we don’t try to fix them, and “Unpresidented,” about what Skinner calls “extraordinary nonsense.”

Skinner says TrumpCard will be in the studio this month and hope to release new music to the public by early summer.

BY ROBIN BLACKBURN