Dolly Parton died peacefully at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville on August 25, surrounded by her family, after a brief battle with cancer. She was 80 years old. Within the hour, Democrat influencer, Harry Sisson was on social media blaming Republicans for defunding her legacy.
Dems didn't even let Dolly's body get cold before they started using her to play their political games.
President Trump ordered flags flown at half-staff nationwide for one week, writing on Truth Social that Parton's death was "a true loss for millions of people." He added, "In her honor, I am lowering the American flag throughout the United States for a one week period beginning tonight at 6:00PM."
Sisson, the liberal social media influencer whose entire career consists of filming himself being outraged at Republicans, couldn't let that stand. He posted that Trump and Republicans were "trying to make it seem like they were aligned with her on the issues," then cited Missouri Republicans cutting funding for Dolly Parton's Imagination Library Literacy Program. He also claimed Trump had cut $12 million in grants for pediatric medical research, contrasting it with the $1 million Parton donated in 2022 to fund pediatric infectious disease research.
The Missouri numbers deserve context Sisson didn't bother providing. State lawmakers reduced the Imagination Library allocation from $6 million to $2 million for the fiscal year 2027 budget. The program, which sends a free book every month to children under five, launched in Missouri in 2023. As of May, more than 167,000 children in the state were enrolled. Books still go out to families in the program. New enrollment paused on July 1. That's a state budget decision in a single state legislature, not a Republican plot to destroy Dolly Parton's life's work. But nuance doesn't trend on social media.
BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales called it out on her show, saying, "Not even an hour after she died, they were trying to politicize her death and turn it into an attack on Trump." She wasn't exaggerating.
Sisson wasn't alone. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed jumped in with a post claiming Parton "used her gift for music to highlight the challenges of poverty, inequality, and struggle in ways that uplifted and inspired working people." The post got ratioed into oblivion. One commenter wrote, "I didn't think anyone would actually politicize Dolly Parton's death." Another pointed out the obvious: "Your religious laws would have had her covered from head to toe and restricted her from playing music."
The criticism of El-Sayed's post centered on a simple observation. Parton was famously, deliberately, almost stubbornly apolitical. She didn't endorse candidates. She didn't give speeches at rallies. She didn't wear pins or post hashtags. She built Dollywood and the Imagination Library and a seven-decade career in music, and she did all of it without a party affiliation.
That's what made her universally beloved. And that's exactly what made her so useful to people who needed a sympathy prop on the worst possible day.
The left-wing framing falls apart on its own terms. Parton twice declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the Trump administration — first because her husband Carl Dean was ill, and later because she didn't want to travel during COVID. When the Biden administration offered it, she hesitated again, saying she worried accepting could appear political. That's a woman who understood something El-Sayed and Sisson never will: that staying out of the fight is what made people trust her.
The Missouri funding argument is the kind of thing that sounds devastating in a tweet and evaporates in a paragraph. One state reduced a line item in a budget cycle. The Imagination Library operates in all 50 states and multiple countries. Parton started it in 1995 from her own pocket. It has survived every administration, every budget fight, every recession. It'll survive Missouri's fiscal year 2027 appropriations committee too.
But none of that matters to the people who saw a national tragedy and immediately reached for the nearest Republican to blame. The woman who gave away 300 million books, who built a theme park in the Smoky Mountains, who quietly donated millions without ever holding a press conference — she became a talking point before she became a memory.
Parton spent 80 years proving you could do enormous good without picking a side. It took her critics about 45 minutes to prove why she was right.