In a wild turn of events that was tiresome yet also hilarious, Congressman Hank Johnson (D-GA) posted a hilariously awful video of himself trying to play the guitar and insult President Donald Trump while doing so. In reality, he simply made a fool of himself in a painfully bad video posted to X (formerly Twitter).
As background, Rep. Johnson is the member of Congress who, 14 years ago, asked a naval officer during a congressional hearing if the island of Guam could “tip over and capsize” if the United States stationed too many soldiers, airmen, and Marines on the island. The congressman looked puzzled when the admiral informed him that the island wouldn’t tip over.
Despite the bizarre incident, Rep. Johnson has remained an Atlanta-area congressman for about a decade and a half since, and still sits in Congress while making a fool of himself, as was shown when he attempted to attack President Trump through a political rendition of the Jimi Hendrix classic “Hey Joe.”
Making the performance not just bad but hilariously bad was that Rep. Johnson, by his own admission, doesn’t know how to play the guitar and was using the public video as a means of learning how to play it. As he said when kicking off the video, “I hate to hurt your ears and everything, but I’m just learning to play guitar.”
What followed that worrisome introduction was a hilariously awful rendition of “Hey Joe” that featured ridiculous anti-Trump lyrics in place of Hendrix’s lyrics, with Johnson singing things like, “Hey Trump, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?” and “I’m goin’ down the street to shoot democracy. You know I wanna be a king someday.”
Captioning the video in his post about it on X, Johnson noted that his terrible rendition of the song was inspired by black music month, saying, “June is Black Music Month. This year, I decided to come back with another jam session for you all. Here is my rendition of “Hey Joe” by the Godfather of Rock, Jimi Hendrix.”
Watch Johnson make a fool of himself here:
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As could be expected from anything having to do with Hank Johnson opening his mouth, a tidal wave of comments poured in to mock him for the ridiculousness of his stunt. The Media Research Center, for example, joked about his late of tune or tone in the absurd video and wrote, “Talk about Tone-Deaf messaging! Democrat Rep. Hank Johnson releases hilariously bad anti-Trump song, and you just have to hear this 😂”
Another person mocked Johnson’s video by bringing up his old Guam comments and writing, “Between the 8th Amendment and the Convention Against Torture, this surely has to be some kind of criminal offense. As a sentence, we send him to Guam where he has to measure whether it has capsized, every day.”
A commenter on a post about the video noted that he might want to figure out how to tune his guitar, writing, “Not that it would do anything to salvage this turd of a “song” but someone should explain to Hank how and why guitarists generally choose to tune their guitars before playing them.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video