“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”: Want, Need, and Donald Trump

ABSTRACT

The strangest appropriation of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” came in 2016, when Donald Trump adopted it as his campaign anthem. Before offering some suggestions about Trump’s use of the song, this essay explores the complexity of its keywords – “want” and “need” – from a variety of interpretive perspectives, including literature, philosophy, economics, sociology, cognitive science, and a makeshift database of song lyrics from the 1960s onward.

KEYWORDS:

• Donald Trump
• need
• Rolling Stones
• want

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wayne Glausser

Wayne Glausser is the author of a number of essays on literary and interdisciplinary topics, including Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century; Cultural Encyclopedia of LSD; and Something Old, Something New: Contemporary Entanglements of Religion and Secularity.