The Ghost of Electricity: What Young Bob Dylan Would Sing in the Shadow of Trump’s America
In an era defined by algorithmic rage, border walls etched into desert sands, and the slow unraveling of democratic norms, the voice of Bob Dylan feels both achingly absent and urgently necessary.
This week, I had the pleasure of watching “A Complete Unknown”, James Mangold’s masterful biopic about Bod Dylan starring Timothée Chalamet, and I was blown away. The film’s raw energy and Chalamet’s portrayal of a young Dylan reignited my interest in his early years as a folk insurgent—a poet who weaponized ambiguity to dismantle the hypocrisy of his age.
But what would a 22-year-old Dylan write today, faced with the tectonic shifts of Trump’s second administration? How would his harmonica wail against the machinery of executive orders stripping citizenship from babies, sanctions strangling the International Criminal Court, and rhetoric that recasts asylum seekers as invaders?
This is not an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a counterfactual blueprint for dissent.
The Folk Process in the Age of Algorithmic Disinformation
Dylan’s early work thrived in the fertile soil of the 1960s protest movement, where songs like *Blowin’ in the Wind* and *The Times They Are A-Changin’* became communal anthems. Yet his genius lay in avoiding didacticism. He wrapped warnings in koans, letting listeners project their fears onto lines like *“How many deaths will it take till he knows / That too many people have died?”*
Today’s Dylan would face a fractured media landscape where truth is Balkanized. Trump’s 2025 executive orders—ending birthright citizenship, reinstating Remain in Mexico, and labeling NGOs aiding immigrants as “facilitators of invasion” rely on a narrative of existential threat. To cut through this, Dylan’s lyrics would weaponize irony rather than sloganeering. Imagine a ballad titled *The Ballad of the Paperless Child*, sketching a infant denied a Social Security number under Trump’s **Executive Order 13981:
Oh, the judge stamped his feet where the cradle once stood,
Said, “This land’s too pure for your misunderstood blood.
And the church bells rang with a sanctified chime,
As they built him a wall in the womb before time.
The song’s power wouldn’t stem from explicit condemnation but from juxtaposing bureaucratic cruelty against the innocence of a newborn—a Dylanesque inversion of the nativity myth.
Electric Surrealism for a Post-Truth World
The song “A Complete Unknown” lingers on Dylan’s 1965 Newport Folk Festival mutiny, where trading acoustic for electric guitar became a metaphor for rejecting ideological rigidity. Dylan seethes with restless creativity, snarling “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” as Pete Seeger grips his axe in dismay.
2025’s Dylan would channel that same defiance against Trump’s sanctions on the ICC, an attempt to shield U.S. officials from war crimes accountability. The protest wouldn’t be acoustic. It’d be a glitchy, synthesizer-driven rant titled *Subpoena Blues*, sampling Trump’s own X post about globalist courts:
Well, the sheriff he came with a subpoena in hand,
Said, “Your honor’s a ghost in a lawless land.”
But the scales tipped heavy with Goldman’s gold,
And the jailhouse doors melted in the heat of the bold.
Here, Dylan mirrors the fragmented reality of a justice system where oligarchs like Peter Thiel fund “anti-woke” prosecutors while Trump’s DOJ threatens NGOs with RICO charges. The dissonant production—reminiscent of Highway 61 Revisited’s chaos—would mirror the cognitive whiplash of living under Project 2025’s theocratic overreach.
Migrant Gospels and the New American Exile
Trump’s Day 1 executive orders resurrect the worst of his first term: mass detention camps, expedited removals, and a border closure justified via racist “invasion” rhetoric. For Dylan, whose 1960s work elevated marginalized voices (The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll), the plight of asylum seekers would demand a modern Desolation Row.
Picture a 10-minute epic titled “The Cactus Christs of El Paso, weaving together:
- A Honduran mother separated from her child under Trump’s “Zero Tolerance 2.0
- A climate refugee from sub-Saharan Africa detained in a for-profit ICE facility
- A U.S. Army interpreter abandoned in Kabul after Trump cancels Afghan parole programs
They’re painting murals of the kids in cages,
While the contractors count their profit margins in stages.
And the preacher shouts, “Invasion!” from a bloodstained pulpit,
As the coyotes laugh and the wall turns to vulcan.
The song’s structure—shifting perspectives, fragmented timelines—would reject linear narrative, forcing listeners to confront the scale of systemic cruelty.
The Death of Nuance and the Poet’s Revenge
“A Complete Unknowns” most daring choice is its refusal to “solve” Dylan. Chalamet’s portrayal leans into the singer’s contradictions: a truth-teller who lied about his past, a civil rights icon who bristled at being called “the voice of a generation.” This elusiveness—the “complete unknown” of the title—is precisely what 2025’s Dylan would weaponize against Trump’s hyper-partisan spectacle.
In an era where Trump’s Executive Order 13983 (reviewing U.S. compliance with human rights treaties, seeks to dismantle international law, Dylan’s lyrics would dwell in ambiguity. A track like “Two White Doves in a Hall of Mirrors” could allegorize the administration’s sabotage of the ICC:
The prosecutor walked with a bulletproof vest,
His warrant was signed but the witness confessed.
And the generals danced in a quadrille formation,
As the jury box burned in the Third World’s ovation.
The song’s meaning would shimmer and shift—is it about Putin? Netanyahu? The U.S. drone program?—denying Trump the clarity he craves.
The Never-Ending Tour Through the American Nightmare
Dylan’s late-career resurgence hinges on his “Shadow Kingdom” (2023) persona—a spectral figure reinterpreting his classics through a noir lens. A young Dylan today would similarly reinvent protest music for the TikTok age.
Consider a viral-ready track titled Algorithm Lullaby, mocking Trump’s social media martyrdom:
They’re livestreaming the coup from a Mar-a-Lago suite,
The QAnon grandma clicks her heels to the beat.
And the AI sings, “Hallelujah, it’s a landslide!”
As the swing states drown in a deepfake tide.
Set to a trap beat layered with distorted folk samples, the song would weaponize the very platforms that spread disinformation—a Dylan 2.0 move.
The Times Are Still A-Changin’ (But the Battle’s Binary)
“A Complete Unknown” ends not with triumph, but with Chalamet’s Dylan fleeing a press conference, his motorcycle roaring into the fog. It’s a fitting metaphor for an artist who resisted categorization. Yet 2025 demands a Dylan who confronts, not evades. The cruelty of Trump’s policies—stripping Temporary Protected Status, jailing asylum seekers, greenlighting ethnic cleansing in Gaza—leaves no room for ambiguity.
The young Dylan would still traffic in enigma, but his targets would be crystalline. His songs would be funhouse mirrors, reflecting the grotesquery of executive overreach. He’d write ballads for the 8-year-old denied insulin because her mother’s Venezuelan parole was revoked. He’d croon dirges for the climate refugees Trump abandoned by rejoining the Paris Accord only to hollow it out.
But above all, he’d channel the closing lines of “A Complete Unknown”, where Chalamet whispers, “I’m not your martyr.” Today’s Dylan would reject the left’s savior complex as fiercely as Trump’s fascism. His poetry would live in the storm’s eye—a reminder that resistance thrives not in certainty, but in the questions we refuse to stop asking.
As the real Dylan once sang: “Let me ask you one question / Is your money that good?” In 2025, the answer echoes through every child cage, every sanction, every lie stamped with the presidential seal.
Mitch Jackson, Esq. | links
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