Carrie Underwood Breaks Her Silence On Inauguration: ‘I Am Humbled To Answer The Call’

Country music legend Carrie Underwood is proud to “answer the call” from the Trump inaugural team to perform at the 47th president’s swearing-in, and recently told her legions of fans that her presence should remind Americans of a vital belief all should get back to sharing again.

Underwood, who has kept her political views out of the public eye for most of her career, admitted this week that she hopes her performance at the inaugural ceremony of President-elect Donald Trump will unite Americans around scenes of a peaceful transition of power during the most turbulent of times. “We need to come together,” she said when asked about why she accepted the offer. Underwood, 41, will take part in the inaugural ceremony in Washington, D.C. on January 20th, according to a spokesman with the Presidential Inaugural Committee, and plans to give her rendition of “America the Beautiful” before a crowd of Trump supporters estimated to number in at least the several hundreds of thousands. The announcement of Underwood’s participation immediately kicked off a round of criticism by far-left media outlets rushing to declare that she had “come out as full MAGA.” But that isn’t why she agreed to perform.

Indeed, long before next week’s performance, Underwood has been called out by conservatives for inserting anti-Second Amendment lyrics into her albums, including the 2018 track “The Bullet” which some fans took to be a political statement about the state of gun violence in America. But all such issues should be laid aside, if at least for one day, to celebrate the transfer of power from President Biden to President-elect Trump. Her statement continued, “I love our country and am honored to have been asked to sing at the Inauguration and to be a small part of this historic event. I am humbled to answer the call at a time when we must all come together in the spirit of unity and looking to the future.” Her three-minute, forty-six-second performance will be backed by the Armed Forces Chorus and the United States Naval Academy Glee Club, People reported.

The singer-songwriter’s agreement to perform is also indicative of her shifting political views since President-elect Trump’s first inauguration. During the 2017 County Music Awards, she and fellow country star Brad Paisley performed a duet of Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” cheekily changing the tagline to “before he tweets” in a viral moment that bought her plenty of anti-Trump pop culture street cred. Observers of Underwood’s career arc began to notice a subtle shift during the pandemic, when she was knocked for liking a tweet from conservative influencer Matt Walsh regarding mask mandates for students in Nashville schools. “I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she told the Guardian in 2019. “Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.” She added that she tries to “stay far out of politics if possible, at least in public, because nobody wins.”