GWAR Once Again Draw MAGA Ire After 'Disemboweling' Trump Effigy Onstage At Washington, DC 'Vans Warped Tour'

GWAR have once again found themselves in the sights of MAGA influencers and right-wing supporters for their latest onstage ‘disemboweling’ of current U.S. President Donald J. Trump. The intergalactic shock metal band have spent decades cartoonishly disposing of countless presidents, political figures, celebrities, religions icons, and more onstage over the years, showing no political allegiance in who gets put on the chopping block in over-the-top b-movie fashion.

However, recalling shades of last year, when the band came under fire for grotesquely offing effigies of Trump and Elon Musk onstage at the 2025 ‘Riot Fest‘, the band have created yet another stir. This time around it’s their outlandish disemboweling of an effigy of Donald J. Trump onstage at last weekend’s ‘Vans Warped Tour‘ stop in Washington, DC (see below) that has created an uproar on social media.

Clueless critics of the band have argued once again that GWAR are inciting violence against President Trump and right-wingers in their actions. Others have equated the band’s activities to demonic behavior. Some have even boldly gone on to claim that GWAR wouldn’t have attempted similar onstage stunts with effigies of past Democratic political figures like Barack Obama and Joe Biden (spoiler alert: they did, see footage here and here.) The below video clip, reposted from TikTok, was responsible for this latest controversy.

As it so happens, GWAR recently addressed this very matter in a newly published interview with Rocking With Jam Man. In it, the band’s vocalist Mike “Blöthar The Berserker” Bishop spoke at length about how the band have able to operate freely in their onstage antics with little consequence, until the Trump administration came into power. Blöthar was quoted as saying [transcribed by Blabbermouth.net]:

“Probably the biggest… All in all, I’m gonna say this, that for years GWAR would do whatever the fuck we wanted. We would kill politicians from both sides of the aisle. We would kill famous people. We never had any backlash. I mean, granted, when we killed Princess Diana, people got a little upset. When we pulled a fish out of Laci Peterson‘s pussy, people got a little upset. But until Donald Trump got in office, that’s when people started getting extremely upset about politics and music and politics in art.

That marked the moment that suddenly GWAR was… People acted as if GWAR had changed, but GWAR didn’t change. The world fricking changed. The way people felt about politics changed. The way people felt about comedy and humor changed.”

“Comics like to complain about, ‘Uh, well, college campuses and censoring speech.’ And yeah, it is true. College kids are fricking stupid. There’s no question about it. And being uptight about identity politics is absurd, but we still never got any heat from that segment. It’s not like feminists or the politically correct squad, they didn’t really come after GWAR. Who came after GWAR was fucking Trump fans. That’s who came after GWAR. It was people that once… Suddenly they can see that they’re on the outside of a cultural moment. And it’s a weird thing, man.”

“We [fictitiously] killed President Obama. We didn’t hear from the Secret Service. But you [fictitiously] kill Trump, and you better believe that there’s gonna be some shit going on. And that happened to us. It happened to us not too long ago. And the truth of the matter is that people think that you live in America, and you look around the world and you’re, like, ‘Oh, well, we’re free. They’re not.’ That’s bullshit. It’s absolute bullshit.

They don’t have to call the police on you. What they have to do is make it hard for you to make money. And that’s what they try to do. And especially a company like Live Nation, which is a big concert company that does shows and stuff like that, they are susceptible to pressure from the government.

They need the government to kind of look the other way on some of their bullshit, like antitrust laws and things like that. And when you upset them, they can lean on you, and that is fucking censorship, no matter what you call it. so, we have faced that. GWAR faces it all the time. It’s a real fucking thing.”

When further asked if GWAR have previously faced any heat from the Secret Service over their antics, Blöthar responded, “Well, let’s just say that GWAR is on some lists.”

A sample of some of the comments left social media platform X made in direct response to the aforementioned clip from last week’s performance can be found below:

This demonic shit needs to stop honestly. Anybody who finds this shit interesting has a few screws loose and possibly a touch of demonic possession— Ibogaine (@FrogPills) June 19, 2026