Might 19, 2025
And that actuality has prompted the president of the USA to lose it.
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(Shirlaine Forrest / Getty Photographs; Win McNamee / Getty Photographs)
It is going to come as a shock to nobody that Donald Trump has by no means preferred Bruce Springsteen.
Nor will it shock anybody acquainted with the forty seventh president’s thin-skinned responses to even the mildest rebukes that Springsteen’s righteous willpower to talk reality to energy—most just lately by decrying “an unfit president and a rogue authorities” that has “no concern or thought for what it means to be deeply American”—would stir Trump’s ire.
Nonetheless, there’s something exceptional about the truth that, after Springsteen launched his European tour by declaring that the USA “is presently within the palms of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” the president of the USA, essentially the most highly effective man on the planet, would fully lose it.
However so he has. In a social media put up despatched Friday from Air Power One, as he was flying dwelling from a toadying tour of essentially the most blindingly regressive redoubts of Center Japanese monarchy, an enraged Trump poured out scorn and menacing language.
“I see that Extremely Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Overseas Nation to talk badly concerning the President of the USA,” the president wrote concerning the songwriter and singer, who has earned 20 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Particular Tony Award, Golden Globes and Kennedy Middle Honors, a spot within the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame and Presidential Medal of Freedom—the final of which was introduced by one other of Trump’s targets for vitriol, former President Barack Obama.
Trump’s rant about Springsteen went on and on. “By no means preferred him, by no means preferred his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a gifted man,” grumbled the president, who decried the singer as “Only a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who got here near destroying our Nation.”
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Trump concluded with a said-no-one-else-ever declare that “Springsteen is dumb as a rock,” earlier than spewing much more private insults and what sounded to a number of of us like a menace. “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his pores and skin is all atrophied!) should KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT till he will get again into the Nation, that’s simply ‘commonplace fare.’ Then we’ll all see the way it goes for him!”
By no means thoughts the stark cynicism of Trump’s attacking an American for exercising his free speech rights whereas overseas, even because the president was interrupting his return journey from a controversial worldwide trek to gripe about Supreme Courtroom arguments, “Radical Left Losers” (presumably Democrats) and “Grandstander” Republicans. And about iconic American pop star Taylor Swift (“she’s not HOT!”). And concerning the son of New Jersey who taught us“The most effective music is basically there to supply you one thing to face the world with.”
What was notably worthy of be aware, and concern, in Trump’s Friday tirade was the final line, the place the president speculated about how “we’ll all see the way it goes for him…” That sounded threatening. And Trump adopted by way of on Monday morning, with a name for “a serious investigation” into Springsteen’s endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris within the 2024 presidential race. In a screed that additionally focused Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed Harris, and U2 singer Bono, who made no endorsement within the race, Trump accused Harris and Springsteen of participating in marketing campaign finance violations as a part of “a really costly and determined effort to artificially construct up her sparse crowds. IT’S NOT LEGAL! For these unpatriotic ‘entertainers,’ this was only a CORRUPT & UNLAWFUL method to capitalize on a damaged system.”
After quite a lot of outstanding entertainers endorsed Harris in 2024, Politico defined Monday, “Rumors falsely circulated that the superstars had been paid hundreds of thousands for his or her assist, which their groups shortly shut down.” And Rolling Stone, noting Springsteen’s statement, “In America, my dwelling, they’re persecuting folks for his or her proper to free speech and voicing their dissent,” wrote Monday“It’s apparently occurring to Springsteen, who now may be positioned beneath investigation for the transgression of supporting the political candidate of his alternative and exercising his constitutionally protected proper to criticize his authorities.”
Free-speech advocates have traditionally understood the focusing on of presidential critics as an affront to the fundamental premise of democracy—notably in a rustic the place a former Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, warned in 1918 that “to announce that there should be no criticism of the President, or that we’re to face by the President, proper or mistaken, shouldn’t be solely unpatriotic and servile, however is morally treasonable to the American public.”
Trump’s more and more intense diatribes have gotten an excessive amount of consideration in latest days. However they haven’t prompted Springsteen to again down. In reality, the musician ramped up his criticisms of the president over the weekend, telling a Manchester viewers, “Tonight, we ask all who consider in democracy and the very best of our American spirit to rise with us, elevate your voices and stand with us towards authoritarianism and let freedom ring.”
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This battle shouldn’t be going away. However nothing Trump says, or does, will change the truth that Springsteen is a patriot within the custom of Tom Paine—a proud American with the knowledge and the braveness to problem leaders who’ve gone awry whereas on the identical time talking, with out irony or artifice, of “the America I like, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years.”
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Springsteen is as true a poet of American democracy as Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Langston Hughes, or Nina Simone. And he’s as true, and efficient, a critic of factory-closing CEOs, Wall Avenue–coddling policymakers, and the oligarchs who abandon working-class cities and the individuals who reside in them as Robert M. La Follette, Jesse Jackson, or Bernie Sanders.
“Bruce Springsteen is an American icon who has spent 5 many years telling the story of blue-collar life on this nation,” New Jersey US Consultant Frank Pallone stated of a working-class New Jerseyan who made good however by no means forgot the place he got here from. “In fact, Donald Trump wouldn’t get it.”
Trump, a billionaire son of privilege whose thought of public service has all the time been to have the general public serve his pursuits, by no means acquired the Springsteen whose songs championed forgotten veterans of the Vietnam Conflict, laid-off steelworkers in Youngstown, folks struggling with AIDS in Philadelphia, the deserted farmers of rural Nebraska, or the courageous firefighters and law enforcement officials who bumped into the World Commerce Middle on 9/11. And Trump, along with his penchant towards monarchical extra, won’t ever perceive the deeply American intuition of the songwriter who virtually 50 years in the past known as out oligarchy with the traces:
Poor man wanna be wealthy
Wealthy man wanna be king
And a king ain’t glad
’Til he guidelines every thing
John Nichols
John Nichols is a nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on matters starting from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Celebration to analyses of US and world media techniques. His newest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Occasions bestseller It is OK to Be Indignant About Capitalism.
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