Lin-Manuel Miranda has explained why he removed a reference to former U.S leader Donald Trump from his new movie In the Heights.

In Miranda’s original Broadway stage musical, the lyric “Donald Trump and I on the links” features in the song 96,000, in which the characters sing about what they’d do if they won the lottery.

In the big-screen adaptation of the production, the lyric has been updated to “Tiger Woods and I on the links”, and speaking to the PA news agency, Miranda explained that Trump was just a TV celebrity when he wrote the music in 2005, many years before he became U.S. President.

“That one that you really can’t chalk up to me, the culture changed that lyric (sic),” he said. “When I wrote that lyric in 2005, he (Trump) was a famous reality TV host and before that he was just sort of a live-action monopoly man. My parents had a Trump board game in the ’80s.

“He kind of put his name on everything with gold on it, and so when time makes a fool of the lyric and we’re in the middle of this joyous aspirational number, that name rings like a discordant bell, it’s like a clang. So school groups were already asking to change that lyric as far back as 2016. We just ratified it for the movie.”

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