Maggie and Africa Brown

Since at least January 2016, Donald Trump has twisted the words and meaning from The Snake—“the song tells the story of a woman who takes in a frozen snake she finds on her way to work. After the snake is nursed back to health, it bites the woman and kills her”—into a racist cautionary tale about immigrants and refugees. Trump’s demented long story short: take them in, and they’ll kill you.

But Trump hasn’t only used lyrics authored by the late singer-songwriter Oscar Brown Jr. without permission. He’s appropriated words written by a black man in order to attack immigrants—regardless of legal status—and refugees fleeing war and death. The artist’s daughters, Africa and Maggie Brown, want Trump to stop using their dad’s song to spread anti-immigrant, anti-refugee fear mongering and xenophobia:

"The elephant in the room is that Trump is the living embodiment of the snake that my father wrote about in that song," Brown said. "It's a political agenda that deals with separatism, racism, sexism, and it's kind of thing that's polar opposite to what Oscar Brown Jr. was about," said Maggie Brown, daughter of Oscar Brown Jr. "And so, to actually quote his words verbatim every time, pulling it out of his breast pocket as if it's this coveted thing that makes him a rock star."

“Brown, who died in 2005, wrote it in 1963 based on ‘The Farmer and the Viper,’ one of Aesop's fables,” reports CNN. “The moral of the story is that kindness can be betrayed.” The two women have sent Trump cease-and-desist letters, “but Trump could claim he's not violating copyright law, by citing fair use.” In the meantime, they know that their father would not only not be a Trump supporter, but that he would not want his art to be a used as a tool of white supremacy. "He always worked with all people of color," Africa said. "He was never against immigrants. [Trump’s] attacking people of brown color and my father supported people all the time of all color."