And that reality has caused the president of the United States to lose it.
It will come as a surprise to no one that Donald Trump has never liked Bruce Springsteen.
Nor will it shock anyone familiar with the 47th president’s thin-skinned responses to even the mildest rebukes that Springsteen’s righteous determination to speak truth to power—most recently by decrying “an unfit president and a rogue government” that has “no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American”—would stir Trump’s ire.
Still, there is something remarkable about the fact that, after Springsteen launched his European tour by declaring that the United States “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, would completely lose it.
But so he has. In a social media post sent Friday from Air Force One, as he was flying home from a toadying tour of the most blindingly regressive redoubts of Middle Eastern monarchy, an enraged Trump poured out scorn and menacing language.
“I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States,” the president wrote about the songwriter and singer, who has earned 20 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Special Tony Award, Golden Globes and Kennedy Center Honors, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Presidential Medal of Freedom—the last of which was presented by another of Trump’s targets for vitriol, former President Barack Obama.
Trump’s rant about Springsteen went on and on. “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy,” grumbled the president, who decried the singer as “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 concluded with a said-no-one-else-ever claim that “Springsteen is dumb as a rock,” before spewing even more personal insults and what sounded to a lot of folks like a threat. “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!”
Never mind the stark cynicism of Trump’s attacking an American for exercising his free speech rights while abroad, even as the president was interrupting his return journey from a controversial international trek to gripe about Supreme Court arguments, “Radical Left Losers” (presumably Democrats) and “Grandstander” Republicans. And about iconic American pop star Taylor Swift (“she’s no longer HOT!”). And about the son of New Jersey who taught us, “The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.”
What was particularly worthy of note, and concern, in Trump’s Friday tirade was the last line, where the president speculated about how “we’ll all see how it goes for him…” That sounded threatening. And Trump followed through on Monday morning, with a call for “a major investigation” into Springsteen’s endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race. In a screed that also targeted Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed Harris, and U2 singer Bono, who made no endorsement in the race, Trump accused Harris and Springsteen of engaging in campaign finance violations as part of “a very expensive and desperate effort to artificially build up her sparse crowds. IT’S NOT LEGAL! For these unpatriotic ‘entertainers,’ this was just a CORRUPT & UNLAWFUL way to capitalize on a broken system.”
After a number of prominent entertainers endorsed Harris in 2024, Politico explained Monday, “Rumors falsely circulated that the superstars were paid millions for their support, which their teams quickly shut down.” And Rolling Stone, noting Springsteen’s observation, “In America, my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent,” wrote Monday, “It’s apparently happening to Springsteen, who now might be placed under investigation for the transgression of supporting the political candidate of his choice and exercising his constitutionally protected right to criticize his government.”
Free-speech advocates have historically understood the targeting of presidential critics as an affront to the basic premise of democracy—particularly in a country where a former Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, warned in 1918 that “to announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
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Trump’s increasingly intense diatribes have gotten a great deal of attention in recent days. But they have not caused Springsteen to back down. In fact, the musician ramped up his criticisms of the president over the weekend, telling a Manchester audience, “Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American spirit to rise with us, raise your voices and stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring.”
This conflict is not going away. But nothing Trump says, or does, will change the fact that Springsteen is a patriot in the tradition of Tom Paine—a proud American with the wisdom and the courage to challenge leaders who have gone awry while at the same time speaking, without irony or artifice, of “the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years.”
Springsteen is as true a poet of American democracy as Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Langston Hughes, or Nina Simone. And he is as true, and effective, a critic of factory-closing CEOs, Wall Street–coddling policymakers, and the oligarchs who abandon working-class towns and the people who live in them as Robert M. La Follette, Jesse Jackson, or Bernie Sanders.
“Bruce Springsteen is an American icon who has spent five decades telling the story of blue-collar life in this country,” New Jersey US Representative Frank Pallone said of a working-class New Jerseyan who made good but never forgot where he came from. “Of course, Donald Trump wouldn’t get it.”
Trump, a billionaire son of privilege whose idea of public service has always been to have the public serve his interests, never got the Springsteen whose songs championed forgotten veterans of the Vietnam War, laid-off steelworkers in Youngstown, people suffering with AIDS in Philadelphia, the abandoned farmers of rural Nebraska, or the brave firefighters and police officers who ran into the World Trade Center on 9/11. And Trump, with his penchant toward monarchical excess, will never understand the deeply American instinct of the songwriter who almost 50 years ago called out oligarchy with the lines:
Poor man wanna be richRich man wanna be kingAnd a king ain’t satisfied’Til he rules everything
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is the executive editor of The Nation. He previously served as the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.