President Trump’s new personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, has made some questionable moves recently. The most prominent: Appearing on last Sunday’s news shows and insisting the president was not under investigation, contradicting the president’s own admission on Twitter that he was. In one exchange with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Sekulow said twice that the president was being investigated, then insisted that he wasn’t.
It turns out that Sekulow has a history of sketchy talent. The Daily Beast uncovered the fact that Seklow has a band, and it is not at all good. The Jay Sekulow Band specialized in Christian music with a few original songs and some covers. Sekulow is an avowed member of the Christian right and a conservative talk-show host who espouses far-right ideals.
“Think of your dad’s garage band that performs the soundtrack of the late-’60s and mid-’70s, but with an overtly conservative and legal agenda,” the site’s writers said.
The band introduced itself on a Facebook page in November 2014: “Welcome to the official page of the Jay Sekulow Band—a place where you can keep up with all of the exciting events surrounding this unique alliance between law and music.”
Here is the band’s cover of “Jesus Is Just Alright” by the Doobie Brothers, a band so pro-pot that they baked it into their name (don’t tell Jeff Sessions):
And the band’s cover of the Band’s “The Weight,” a song inspired by the films of Luis Buñuel, a renowned atheist who often excoriated organized religion:
It’s unclear whether Sekulow et. al. were performing the songs ironically.
The song’s original content often concentrated on Washington. “Undemocratic” is perhaps the only rock song about a former IRS commissioner. (In this case, Lois Lerner, who was alleged to have targeted opponents of President Obama for audits.) It went like this: “You took the lead to act by what you wanted to do / Only trouble is nobody voted for you / democracy in motion means a right to take sides / since when is one rewarded for the email she hides?”
Listener reviews on the band’s Facebook page are literally ecstatic — “Thank you JSB for glorifying God with your amazing talents!!!,” one commenter wrote — but rock critics have given the band reviews commensurate with Sekulow’s performance last Sunday. “Sekulow isn’t any better at rockin’ out than he is at defending Trump,” wrote a reviewer for Spin. “Maybe he should go back to his day job of demonizing Muslims and gay people in the name of religious liberty.”
