Gwar have spent decades ripping apart politicians, celebrities and dictators in the most absurd ways possible, but it’s their recent Trump and Elon Musk stage stunts that have pushed things into darker territory.
Shock metal institution Gwar found themselves under fire following footage from Riot Fest 2025, where they staged the cartoonish disembowelling of Donald Trump and beheaded Elon Musk mid set, for a band built on fake blood, alien lore and over the top violence, it was business as usual. The backlash, however, was anything but (per the PRP).
When satire stops being funny for some
Clips from the performance quickly spread across social media, landing squarely in the sights of MAGA aligned commentators.
One of the loudest responses came from Libs Of TikTok, who posted:
“Performers at Riot Fest in Chicago, Illinois, simulated the bloody disemboweling of President Trump on stage while people cheered. This is incitement. They know exactly what they’re doing. Democrats can’t help themselves. They love promoting violence.”
That kind of rhetoric didn’t stay online discourse for long, it escalated into death threats directed at the band, something Gwar don’t take lightly, even if they thrive on controversy.
“It’s a cartoon, it’s Looney Tunes”
Frontman Blöthar The Berserker initially brushed off the outrage, sticking to the band’s long standing mix of satire and provocation.
“The idea that GWAR is normalizing violence is patently absurd.”
He doubled down further: “We’re not millionaires that are afraid of what people are going to say when they see what we do… Yeah, it pissed me off! We’re a group of artists that makes art, and it’s really the idea that what we have done is normalizing violence… there’s nothing normal about the violence that goes on at a GWAR show. It’s a cartoon, it’s Looney Tunes.”
The line Gwar won’t accept
Behind the masks, though, the reaction hit harder than the band let on publicly.
Speaking recently, guitarist Balsac The Jaws Of Death addressed the reality of those threats: “In a sense, it’s just laughable, but it was scary when we were getting death threats over social media. It did get me very upset when people were trying to say: ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ This is the country where we’re supposed to be able to do that! People were saying we can’t do it after we’d been doing it for 40 years.”
That’s the contradiction Gwar are pointing at, a band that’s spent four decades slaughtering symbolic figures onstage suddenly becomes a flashpoint, not because of what they do, but because of who they did it to.
For Gwar, nothing’s really changed, the blood is still fake, the targets are still exaggerated, and the whole thing still sits firmly in the realm of grotesque theatre, the difference now is how seriously people are choosing to take it.
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