Nancy Sinatra Is Furious at Trump for Using Her Father's Music
Donald Trump posted a video of Frank Sinatra singing "My Way" on Truth Social over the weekend. He didn't explain why. He didn't write a caption. He just put it up.
Frank Sinatra's eldest daughter noticed immediately.
"This is a sacrilege," Nancy Sinatra, 85, wrote on X on April 19.
When another user asked if there was anything she could do about it legally, she was blunt. "Unfortunately no. The only people who can do something are the publishers."
That was just the beginning. By April 20 she was reposting another user's message that went considerably further — and her single word response to it said everything about where she stands.
"This is just sickening," the post read. "Frank Sinatra would never have allowed that monster in the White House to use his music or put his lyrics in his mouth. Sinatra was a man of honor, a man who never had to lie about who he truly was because he WAS the greatest. trump is a loser."
Nancy's response to that post was one word: "Truth."
Why Trump Posted It
Nobody knows. There was no caption. No context. No explanation attached to the clip on Truth Social. Trump just put up a video of one of the most iconic performances in American music history and let people draw their own conclusions.
The timing offers some hints though. The post went up on April 18 in the middle of genuinely fraught negotiations with Iran. The US and Iran have been at war since February 28. A fragile two-week ceasefire was agreed to on April 8 following ongoing military conflict and the deaths of 13 American service members. Those negotiations are hanging by a thread.
The day after posting the Sinatra clip Trump went back on Truth Social with a very different message — warning Iran that if they don't accept what he called a "very fair and reasonable deal," the United States would "knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran." He signed it off with "NO MORE MR. NICE GUY."
From Frank Sinatra singing about doing things his way to threatening infrastructure destruction in 24 hours. It's a wide emotional range.
The Sinatra-Trump History
This isn't the first time Trump has helped himself to "My Way" without anyone asking him to. The song has been used at Trump events and played after his speeches going back years. It became something of an unofficial anthem for him during his political rise — the defiant, I-answered-to-no-one energy of the song mapping neatly onto the persona he's spent decades cultivating.
Frank Sinatra himself is a more complicated figure to claim as a political ally. He was a Democrat for much of his life, a close friend of John F. Kennedy, and deeply involved in liberal causes during the civil rights era. His politics shifted over the years but he was never a simple symbol for any one side of the political aisle.
What isn't complicated is how Nancy feels about this particular president using her father's legacy.
She has made her feelings about Trump clear before. This weekend was not a new position for her — it was a very public, very sharp restatement of it.
The Song Itself
"My Way" is one of those rare songs that belongs to whoever is singing it in the moment — which is exactly why it keeps getting used and exactly why disputes over it keep happening.
What most people don't know is that Frank Sinatra wasn't the song's originator. "My Way" began as a French song called "Comme d'habitude," co-composed by Jacques Revaux with lyrics by Claude François and Gilles Thibault. Paul Anka — the Canadian-American singer and songwriter also known for writing "She's a Lady" — heard the French song, bought the rights, and wrote an entirely new set of English lyrics in 1969. He was 25 years old at the time.
He wrote them specifically for Sinatra. The song was released in early 1969 and became one of the defining recordings of Frank Sinatra's career. "My Way" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000 and has cemented itself as one of the most covered songs in history.
Nancy acknowledged the song's origins in an X post, confirming that Anka's English lyrics are entirely different from the original French — making "My Way" as we know it essentially a new song built on someone else's melody.
Anka, now 84, noted on Facebook that he wrote the lyrics when he was just 25. The song he wrote at 25 is now being fought over by an 85-year-old woman protecting her father's legacy from a president who apparently just really likes the vibe of it.
Frank Sinatra did things his way. Right now Nancy is doing things hers.
And she has made very clear she doesn't think the two belong in the same sentence.
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