Carrie Underwood will sing “America the Beautiful” at the inauguration ceremony immediately prior to president-elect Donald J. Trump being sworn in next week. Her reps and the Trump-Vance inaugural committee confirmed the news Monday.
“I love our country and am honored to have been asked to sing at the Inauguration and to be a small part of this historic event,” Underwood said in a statement. “I am humbled to answer the call at a time when we must all come together in the spirit of unity and looking to the future.”
The inaugural festivities take place in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, a date that coincidentally coincides with the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday. Underwood will be accompanied in her rendition of the standard by the Armed Forces Chorus and the United States Naval Academy Glee Club.
Underwood is a much higher-profile star than the Trump team was able to procure for his 2017 inauguration, at a time when he was being more shunned by entertainment big-wigs and major media companies than he seems to be in 2024. At the 2017 swearing-in, “America’s Got Talent” runner-up Jackie Evancho was the biggest name on board.
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Classical crossover singer Christopher D. Macchio is also on the schedule to perform an unnamed “musical selection” just before JD Vance is sworn in as vice president.
News of Underwood performing immediately lit a firestorm on social media, with conservatives applauding her willingness to perform at the ceremony and some Democratic fans taking a more dim view — and the Daily Beast greeted reports with the headline: “Carrie Underwood Comes Out as MAGA With Trump Inauguration Gig.”
But whatever the inaugural appearance may signify to others, Underwood is likely to uphold the publicly apolitical status she has always maintained in the past. Social media users did take note during the pandemic in 2021 when her account appeared to “like” a Matt Walsh tweet opposing mask mandates in schools. (“Like anyone else, I am upset and disturbed that Carrie Underwood liked one of my tweets,” Walsh said in a sarcastic tweet at the time. “I demand that she renounce me and apologize.”) Much further back, in 2012, she caught the ire of some conservatives when she was quoted as affirming gay relationships, which she later couched as being a spur-of-the-moment aside in an interview, not a planned declaration.
These fleeting possible exceptions aside, Underwood has kept her views on politics and virtually all hot-button issues private. “I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she said in a 2019 interview with the Guardian. “I try to stay far out of politics if possible, at least in public, because nobody wins. It’s crazy. Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.”