The family, too, was flabbergasted by the contradiction of Trump using their father’s work. The Associated Press called Maggie Brown and her sister, Africa, for comment, and soon after they were interviewed on MSNBC and CNN. On Trump’s hundredth day in office, he once again recited the lyrics. The irony that the song - written by an African American activist and musician - was being weaponized to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment wasn’t lost on the media. I hated the idea of him using Oscar’s words to create such a platform.” “It reminded me of a lynching scene, getting folks all riled up, about to kill this. “My first feeling was that my dad’s name doesn’t belong in Trump’s mouth,” she said. When she first saw a video of the performance, Maggie Brown, daughter of the song’s real author, Oscar Brown Jr., was relieved. In February 2016, when Trump asked a Florida crowd if they wanted to hear “The Snake,” he wrongly credited it to singer Al Wilson. A sequence of Trump reading “The Snake,” interspersed with videos and photography from the U.S.-Mexico border, starts FRONTLINE’s newest film, Zero Tolerance. In Trump’s reading, the tale was a parable for the dangers of lax immigration policies. In the song “The Snake,” which Trump recited at many of his 2016 campaign rallies, a “tenderhearted woman” finds a half-frozen snake on a path and rescues it, only to be bitten. But every so often, he’d pull a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and start to read aloud. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump famously avoided teleprompters, bragging about his ability to craft entire speeches from off-the-cuff remarks.