Bruce Springsteen has never been shy about speaking his mind, but his latest broadside at Donald Trump might be one of his sharpest yet.
Over the decades, the Boss has turned his music into a mirror for America’s soul—singing about the AIDS epidemic, migrant workers, shuttered factories, and the scars of endless war. For just as long, critics have sneered at the irony of a private-jet-flying rock star preaching solidarity with the working poor. Springsteen, though, has always worn that contradiction on his sleeve, famously calling himself “a rich man in a poor man’s shirt.”
But these days, irony isn’t the thing haunting him. It’s the fact that many of the very people he’s spent a lifetime singing about have embraced Trump. “A lot of people bought into his lies,” Springsteen says. “He doesn’t care about the forgotten anybody but himself and the multibillionaires who stood behind him on Inauguration Day.”
That truth, he admits, is a bitter pill: “You have to face the fact that a good number of Americans are simply comfortable with his politics of power and dominance.”
Trump hasn’t taken the Boss’s shots quietly. After Springsteen recently delivered a blistering speech, Trump fired back, labeling him “highly overrated” and even posting a meme of himself whacking the rocker with a golf ball. Springsteen just laughs at that. “I absolutely couldn’t care less what he thinks about me.”
But then his tone hardens. “He’s the living personification of what the 25th Amendment and impeachment were for. If Congress had any guts, he’d be consigned to the trash heap of history.”
Springsteen doesn’t save all his fire for the right, either. He has harsh words for Democrats, accusing them of failing to find the language—or the leaders—to connect with the majority of Americans. “We’re desperately in need of an effective alternative party, or for the Democratic Party to find someone who can speak to the majority of the nation. There is a problem with the language that they’re using and the way they’re trying to reach people.”