President Donald Trump dances after speaking at a campaign rally last month. Photo / AP
Incumbent president Donald Trump has posted a video of himself dancing to the Village People's hit song YMCA as Americans vote in the most important election of a lifetime.
Trump shared the two-minute-long video last night with the caption "VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!" and it quickly racked up millions of views.
The edited clip shows Trump cutting shapes at various rallies, with exhortations to vote and copious finger-pointing added for effect.
Trump has been playing the disco classic at his rallies, despite original members of the Village People asking him to stop.
Victor Willis, the police officer in the iconic group, told the BBC that copyright laws meant his hands are tied but he opposes the song's use.
As far as endorsing Trump, I don't endorse Trump, I have never endorsed Trump, nor has the Village People," he said.
"So we have even asked him to even stop playing our music at his rallies."
After a campaign marked by rancour and fear, Americans today decide between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, selecting a leader to steer a nation battered by a surging pandemic that has killed more than 231,000 people, cost millions their jobs and reshaped daily life.
Nearly 100 million Americans voted early, and now it falls to Election Day voters to finish the job, ending a campaign that was upended by the coronavirus and defined by tensions over who could best address it. Each candidate declared the other fundamentally unfit to lead a nation grappling with Covid-19 and facing foundational questions about racial justice and economic fairness.
Biden entered Election Day with multiple paths to victory while Trump, playing catch-up in a number of battleground states, had a narrower but still feasible road to clinch 270 Electoral College votes. Control of the Senate was at stake, too: Democrats needed to net three seats if Biden captured the White House to gain control of all of Washington for the first time in a decade. The House was expected to remain under Democratic control.
Voters braved long lines and the threat of the virus to cast ballots as they chose between two starkly different visions of America for the next four years. The record-setting early vote — and legal skirmishing over how it will be counted — drew unsupported allegations of fraud from Trump, who refused to guarantee he would honor the election's result.
- Additional reporting, AP
The Australian site cited a 'heightened threat level' as the issue.