‘Corrupt'? ‘Dried out prune'? The savage war between Bruce Springsteen and Donald Trump

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Bruce Springsteen and Donald Trump have more in common than either may care to admit. The pair grew up 40 miles away from each other, separated by the waters between New Jersey and New York. They are septuagenarians (Springsteen is 76 while Trump is 78) whose successes can largely be attributed to their ability to speak to blue-collar America. They are, to many, the quintessential champions of the working man.
They also cannot stand each other. After years trading barbs over politics, the pair have, for the past week or so, engaged in their bitterest war of words yet.
Springsteen fired the first shot last Wednesday night at Manchester's Co-op Live arena as he kicked off his latest European tour. 'In my home, the America I love, the America I've written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,' he said on stage. 'Tonight we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!'
He added: 'There's some very weird, strange and dangerous sh-t going on out there right now. In America they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.' Trump's America, he went on, was now a place where the richest people in the country were 'taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers'; a country that is 'abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom'.
Springsteen was so pleased with his outburst that it is included on the recording of this tour's live album.
Trump responded with characteristic magnanimity and grace (and eccentric use of capital letters). 'I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States,' he wrote on social media. '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.
'Springsteen is 'dumb as a rock,' ' Trump added, '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!'
In a sign that Springsteen has somehow managed to get under his skin, Trump has now posted a mocked-up video showing the President whacking the rocker with a golf ball.
Though Springsteen is Trump's current bête noire, the President is hugely unpopular with his fellow rockers. The Canadian-American Neil Young, for instance, has never shied away from expressing his dislike of the President, by calling him 'the worst President in the history of our great country' and musing that he may be banned from entering the US because of his forthright views. Meanwhile, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee shared an open letter to Trump on social media last month in which he described him as a 'f—ing lunatic' and said he was 'clearly so out of your depth you needed scuba gear'.
The Boss has criticised Trump almost as soon as he made his way down the golden escalator of Manhattan's Trump Tower and launched his first tilt at the presidency. It did not help that, during his first campaign, Trump would regularly play Springsteen's 1984 hit Born in the USA at rallies.
It has been a bugbear of Springsteen's since the song was released that it was co-opted by the Republican party, starting with Ronald Reagan, and that it is seen as a tub-thumping jingoistic anthem, rather than the critique of the Vietnam war and America's subsequent treatment of veterans that he meant it to be.
Springsteen has described the song as 'one of my greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music' and was 'a demand for a 'critical' patriotic voice along with pride of birth'.
Party politics was seemingly not of interest to Springsteen at the time, as he chose to focus his songwriting instead on what he called 'human politics': the lives of everyday folk such as bus drivers, factory workers and waitresses. In a 1984 interview, he revealed that he had last voted 12 years previously, when Democrat George McGovern failed to defeat Richard Nixon.
Though he championed a number of causes — including food banks, Amnesty International and, perhaps peculiarly, the Durham miners — it took until 2004 for Springsteen to get involved in the cut-and-thrust of American elections, when he supported John Kerry in his attempt to eject George W Bush from the White House. Kerry lost.
Springsteen went on to stump for Barack Obama in his two successful campaigns, and their bromance was so tight that they even went on to host a podcast series, Renegades, together in 2021.
Enter Trump. Like many of his Republican forebears, he tended to ignore (or did not understand) the subversive lyrics of Born in the USA when it was played at campaign stops. The patriotic chorus lyrics are easy to sing at great volume, while the nuanced criticism of government policies are delivered in a much more mumbled way.
Springsteen, as ever, did not approve but also chose not to seek legal redress to stop Trump. (Others did, including The Rolling Stones, who sent cease-and-desist letters to the Trump campaign over its repeated use of You Can't Always Get What You Want.)
Instead, Springsteen endorsed Hillary Clinton (whom he said would be a 'very, very good president') and performed at one of her campaign rallies in Philadelphia. But while his previous support for Democrats had taken the form of positively making the case for their candidates, Springsteen very publicly went after Trump. 'The republic is under siege by a moron, basically,' he told Rolling Stone in September 2016. 'The whole thing is tragic. Without overstating it, it's a tragedy for our democracy.'
On a Norwegian chat show, Springsteen said that the fact Trump was even running for the presidency was 'a great embarrassment if you're an American'. In the weeks before the election he variously described Trump as being 'a flagrant, toxic narcissist' and a 'conman'. He told The Guardian of Trump: 'What you see is a bundle of anxiety, fragility and insecurity… It's the thinnest possible mask of masculinity.'
Then, something that was previously unthinkable happened: conservatives at Trump rallies started to boo when the pounding drums and synthesiser refrain of Born In The USA kicked in.
The enmity did not go away when Trump triumphed over Clinton. There was outrage when the B Street Band, a Springsteen tribute act, was booked to play one of Trump's inaugural balls in January 2017. So intense was the criticism from fans of the E Street Band that the gig was cancelled.
Then, in April, Springsteen sang an anti-Trump anthem called That's What Makes Us Great — a deliberate inversion of his 'Make America Great Again' slogan. 'Don't tell me a lie / And sell it as a fact / I've been down that road before / And I ain't going back,' he sang. 'Don't you brag to me / That you never read a book / I never put my faith / In a con man and his crooks.' During the first Trump presidency, Springsteen used the pulpit of his stage to lash out at policies such as the travel ban on people from Muslim-majority countries and the separation of families at the Mexican border.
All the while, Trump uncharacteristically did not rise to the bait, though he did refer to The Boss as he mused on his election victory at a rally in October 2019. 'I didn't need Beyonce [sic] and Jay-Z… and I didn't need little Bruce Springsteen.'
Springsteen was, predictably, a vocal supporter of Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential race, and even reworked My Hometown for a Democrat campaign advert.
But it is in the last year or so that the gloves have come off. Last May, Trump called Springsteen a 'wacko' before claiming (without any proof) that Springsteen and other liberal stars had secretly voted for him in 2020. He also claimed that the crowds at his rallies were bigger than those at Springsteen's concerts.
Springsteen made clear how urgent he thought it was that Kamala Harris defeated Trump last November. 'Donald Trump is running to be an American tyrant,' he said in October. 'He does not understand this country, its history, or what it means to be deeply American.'
Speaking to The Telegraph in the autumn, Springsteen listed many of the reasons why he felt Trump ought not to win again. 'He's an insurrectionist. You know, he led a coup on the United States government, so there's no way he should be let anywhere near the office of the presidency,' he said. 'Not to mention, he's mentally ill. The whole thing of standing and swaying for 40 minutes at your town hall? I mean, swaying to music, that's my job.'
Obviously, Springsteen's warnings did not help propel Harris to the White House and, after his latest outbursts, Trump is in no mood to take criticism from the celebrity-industrial complex. During his tour to the Middle East, he took some time off from being the leader of the free world to send a volley of hate towards his enemies on social media.
'How much did Kamala Harris pay Bruce Springsteen for his poor performance during her campaign for president?' Trump wrote (all in capitals). 'Why did he accept that money if he is such a fan of hers? Isn't that a major and illegal campaign contribution? …And how much went to Oprah, and Bono???
'IT'S NOT LEGAL! For these unpatriotic 'entertainers,' this was just a CORRUPT & UNLAWFUL way to capitalize on a broken system,' Trump added.
Springsteen has appeared unrattled by Trump's abuse, and has his own vocal allies willing to support him. Neil Young, for instance, waded into the row with his own social media posts.
'Bruce and thousands of musicians think you are ruining America,' Young, 79, wrote. 'I am not scared of you. Neither are the rest of us.'
Young went on to raise a hitherto-unspoken question about the drama: why does Trump, the most powerful man in the world, care what Bruce Springsteen says about him? 'STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT ROCKERS ARE SAYING. Think about saving America from the mess you made,' he wrote. 'You are forgetting your real job. You work for us. Wake up Republicans! This guy is out of control. We need a real president!'
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