Bruce Springsteen and Max Weinberg performing in Manchester, England. Photo by Getty Images
Bruce Springsteen is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore.
Last week, Springsteen kicked off his current Land of Hope and Dreams European tour in Manchester, England, where he peppered his concert with remarks critical of the Trump administration. The 75-year-old rocker repeated many of those same remarks the next night, and he posted them on his official website. Springsteen said that America “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration” that takes “sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.”
“They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands,” he continued. “They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”
Perhaps the Boss, as Springsteen is sometimes referred to colloquially, should know better than to get into a pissing match with a skunk, although his remarks were not unprecedented — in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, Springsteen called Trump a “moron.”
But more recently, Springsteen has apparently reached his breaking point, lashing out at the U.S. president (whom he never named), inevitably provoking Donald Trump’s wrath in a series of rejoinders the 78-year-old president posted to his Truth Social platform.
“I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States,” Trump wrote. “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country.” (Trump may have “never liked” Springsteen’s music, but that did not stop him from using the Boss’s “Born in the U.S.A.” on the campaign trail in 2016, as did Ronald Reagan before him.)
Trump later posted: “Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock,’ and couldn’t see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse!)? This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”
Springsteen’s current tour includes 16 shows across six European countries, running into early July. Assuming the Boss attempts a homecoming at the end of the tour’s run, all eyes will be on the airport through which Springsteen — who was indeed born in the U.S.A. — tries to return home.
Springsteen is no stranger to parlaying his popular success as a rock ‘n’ roll icon in the service of progressive social causes and politics. He has lent his support in both song and in offstage activism to a variety of issues, including civil rights, veterans’ treatment, hunger, and renewable energy — his version of tikkun olam, or repairing a broken world.
Springsteen began leveraging his celebrity with onstage activism at least as far back as the 1979 No Nukes concerts. He continued to link himself to causes including support of local food banks on the Born in the USA tour of 1984-85, Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now! Tour in 1988, and 2014’s Concert for Valor, a superstar effort to raise awareness and support for veterans’ causes.
Springsteen has also campaigned actively for a slew of Democratic presidential candidates, including John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
But while his activism has been almost wholly expressed in positive terms, in his songs — and sometimes in his words — Springsteen sometimes adopts a prophetic tone, tending to take a more critical view of where American society has failed to live up to its ideals.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, the beloved 20th-century philosopher and activist rabbi, once wrote, “The prophets do not offer reflections about ideas in general. Their words are onslaughts, scuttling illusions of false security, challenging evasions, calling faith to account, questioning prudence and impartiality.” In another place at another time, Heschel may well have been a rock critic, so utterly on the mark that description is of Springsteen’s work. Heschel also once wrote, “The words in which the prophets attempted to relate their experiences were not photographs but illustrations, not descriptions but songs.”
Perhaps, for his own mental well-being, Springsteen might take these words of Heschel to heart: “What saved the prophets from despair was their messianic vision and their idea of man’s capacity for repentance… The prophet is a person who, living in dismay, has the power to transcend his dismay.”
