OK, in the pool of weird things to happen in 2020, who had rock star Axl Rose and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin beefing on Twitter?
It happened Wednesday night, when Rose, the frontman for Guns N’ Roses, tweeted, unprompted, that Mnuchin is “officially an a--hole.” Two hours later, Mnuchin responded: “What have you done for the country lately?”
Mnuchin originally included an emoji of the Liberian flag, then deleted it and re-posted with the American flag. (In fairness, they look kinda alike.)
It’s unclear exactly what triggered Rose’s tweet, but it came a day after his band’s cover of “Live and Let Die” played as President Donald Trump toured a face-mask plant in Arizona. In the past, Rose has blasted Trump for playing Guns N’ Roses songs at rallies without his permission.
“Just so ya know… GNR like a lot of artists opposed to the unauthorized use of their music at political events has formally requested r music not b used at Trump rallies or Trump associated events,” he said in 2018.
It also could have been Mnuchin’s opposition to loosening requirements for small businesses to receive government aid amid the coronavirus pandemic, telling Fox Business Network on Monday that “I don’t have the flexibility to change that.”
Or it could have been Mnuchin’s announcement Tuesday that the Treasury Department would dispurse $4.8 billion in aid to Native American tribal governments, though some tribes had sued the government seeking to block some of the total of $8 billion in aid from going to for-profit Native American corporations in Alaska.
Rose has only tweeted six times this year — two of those retweets — but has previously railed against the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers.
But again, in fairness to Mnuchin, Guns N’ Roses has not released an album since “Chinese Democracy” in 2008. (Although everyone can probably agree that 1987’s “Appetite for Destruction” is a timeless treasure, even in a crazy 2020.)
This article originally appeared on MarketWatch.
