MINISTRY's AL JOURGENSEN: 'Everyone Knows' TRUMP Is An Idiot

MINISTRY's mainman Al Jourgensen was recently interviewed by France's United Rock Nations Radio. You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On the lyrical themes covered on MINISTRY's new album, "AmeriKKKant":

Al Jourgensen: "It's not really a manifesto against [U.S. president Donald] Trump. Trump is inconsequential; everyone knows he's an idiot and he doesn't mean anything — he's just crazy. But that being said, it's more of a manifesto against a society that would elect somebody like Trump. So it's more of a case of me going around… I'm more of a photographer on this album than I'm a musician. I just went out and I took pictures in my head of what society has become and what society would think that a crazy person like Trump is a good idea to lead your country. And that's what this album is more about than Trump. Trump is just Trump. Whatever. Fuck him!"

On Trump being a democratically elected president:

Al Jourgensen: "Well, yeah, but as you look around the globe, it's not just America. As you look at people like Marine Le Pen, or you look at Austria or Poland, and the right-wing faction in Italy and the rise of the National Front again in Germany, making Merkel's life a mess, the Philippines with Duterte, authoritarian dictatorships all over the globe, including Putin, and the Chinese premier just made himself emperor. I mean, this is the thing — the society is either too tired or too lazy to do any kind of investigation themselves on matters and they're uneducated because our education system has been slanted towards making them just like worker drones for the one-percenters that run the world. And so you have a situation where all these people divide and conquer the populace by making them afraid of their neighbors, whether it be Mexicans and blacks over here, or Muslims in Europe, or Muslims over here too. And so they rule by fear, they divide and conquer, they make sure you're not educated enough, and they make sure you have to work 80 hours a week just to pay bills and survive while the rich get richer and richer. And meanwhile, they turned social media against us. What used to be the information age… the Internet, when it first came out, they viewed it as the information age, and it's become the disinformation age. So the powers that be have figured out another way to divide the populace by making us all watch cats playing piano and sharing it with friends and wondering how many 'likes' you get, and that's much more important than [them] taking away your health care or starting a war somewhere. It's how many 'likes' you got by sharing a cat playing piano on YouTube. So all these conditions combined made me very angry and wanna write something about it on this record. Trump is just a manifestation, he's just a symbol of what's going on. So that's pretty much the core heart of what this album is about."

"AmeriKKKant" was released on March 9 via Nuclear Blast.

For MINISTRY's current North American tour in support of the disc, Jourgensen has assembled an impressive group of all-star musicians — MINISTRY stalwarts Sin Quirin and Cesar Soto on guitars, Tony Campos on bass, and keyboardist John Bechdel, along with guest vocalist Burton C. Bell (FEAR FACTORY) and live scratcher DJ Swamp (BECK, THE CRYSTAL METHOD). The band is presenting a brand new setlist that includes more new songs from "AmeriKKKant", giant inflatable Trump chickens, video screens projecting images to complement the music, and a couple of Antifa soldiers.