Bruce Springsteen and Donald Trump deserve each other
The Boss has made a career scripting Trump’s themes but now they’re both mad about it
The Boss got in a big fight with The Boss this week. It was not a good look for either of them. Bruce Springsteen and Donald Trump deserve each other, and deserve better from each other, whether they like it or not.
Before going further, I need to disclaim my Bruce fandom. I’ve been to his shows, read every word of his 510-page autobiography, and enjoy his deepest cuts. My musician daughter often derides my Springsteen obsession because as she says “vocally, he almost can’t sing.” But man can he write. You may put Bob Dylan’s poetry ahead of his, but as a native of a mill town, I feel more listening to Bruce.
When Bruce came to Washington, DC in 2023, I was just past a clean 2-years-post-cancer PET scan. Standing with my back to the wall in the last row of the arena’s upper deck, accompanied by seven people I love, listening to Bruce and 12,000 fans belt out “Better Days,” I felt my good fortune just wash over me. Even though the song was 30 years old, it wasn’t until that moment in my life that I identified with Springsteen’s own epiphany of pivoting across a threshold. That’s powerful, and it’s not all. I use “No Surrender,” “Pink Cadillac” and “Badlands” in my earbuds to make me run faster. When I’m in a work jam, I plug in “Wrecking Ball” to jog my fighting mind.
I like the poet of Freehold so much I overlook his hard-core Democratic politics. But this week I noticed it. To open a concert in England, The Boss lacerated Donald Trump, who I’ve also heard called “The Boss” by people high up in his orbit.
“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. 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!”
Never one to let anyone have the last word, the 47th President fired back with one of his edgier social media posts, which is saying something.
Sleepy Joe didn’t have a clue as to what he was doing, but 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...”
This is not a column that seeks to referee either man’s diatribe – though Bruce is right that Trump is not reverential enough of free speech and people “voicing their dissent,” and the President is correct that it’s unpatriotic for Bruce to use his platform to run down his country and the leaders it chooses while overseas. That’s not the interesting part of this tiff, however.
Having written a lot about the populist realignment, including a book called The Great Revolt with Salena Zito, of Middle of Somewhere fame, I find it notable that Springsteen and Trump literally passed each other in the hallway of American politics en route to the other’s previous station.
For a half century, Springsteen’s art has been the country’s most consistent chronicle of its working class. His stories are of cops, ironworkers, veterans, and carnies, beat down by the powers that be, and still clinging to the tenets of the American dream while wearing its scars. The Boss took us from the Vietnam War, whose draft he readily admits he dodged, through de-industrialization, to the flood of migrants that roils our national debate today. He channeled populism’s angst more clearly than anyone in his field.
Somewhere along the way, though, Bruce became The Man, and he knows it. In “Better Days,” which has become my favorite of his 400-plus songs, he laments “it’s a sad, funny ending to find yourself pretending / A rich man in a poor man’s shirt.”
Bruce’s music even foretold that becoming that rich man would not likely satisfy him. In “Badlands,” the stickiest riff says “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king. And a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything.” By 1978 Bruce was already on his way to being rich. Did he know even then that one day he would not be content to use his stage just for art or lucre, but that he’d feel compelled to lecture fans on politics, too? It wasn’t until 2004 that Bruce emerged as a go-to celebrity endorser for Democrats, but it’s a king-making drug he’s not put down since.
No matter what, young Bruce could not have foreseen that the working class his music honored would be rallied by a Park Avenue billionaire like Donald Trump. Now, unlikely as it is, the populist President should acknowledge the Springsteen catalog as kindred material, and the writer should respect his audience’s coalescence into a dominant political force behind Trump.
Bruce’s siren is perhaps most purely distilled in a song called “Youngstown,” on his “Ghost of Tom Joad” album. It just so happens that Ohio city, of all the places in America, best exemplifies the partisan realignment that sustains Trump.
Springsteen’s 1995 tune traces the steel town from its founding through the abrupt shutdown known as Black Monday in 1977 that started a long decline. The song’s narrator laments to the America that moved on: “Once I made you rich enough / rich enough to forget my name,” presaging Trump’s overt appeal to the forgotten rusting heartland. Bruce gives voice to the skepticism that blue-collar places like Youngstown “sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam / Now we’re wondering what they were dying for” – a heartland sentiment that Trump leveraged in his rants against the Bush-ian “forever wars.”
Bruce’s song connects Youngstown’s plight to that of the “coal mines of Appalachia” and Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley. When he wrote that song in Bill Clinton’s first term, all three places were voting Democratic, but none do now.
Trump lost Youngstown’s Mahoning County narrowly in 2016, but just four years earlier, the Republican nominee Mitt Romney had lost it by 28 points. By 2024, despite Bruce’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, Trump drubbed her in Mahoning County by double digits. A 40-point swing in one place in just 12 years is unheard of in American politics, and thus indicative of a realignment.
On the same album with “Youngstown” are songs skewering the cruel human and drug trafficking by the Mexican cartels – “Sinaloa Cowboys” and “Balboa Park.” Culture critic Steven Hyden, in a super book on The Boss, marveled at how ahead of his time Bruce was, 20 years before the issue came to dominate Trump-era politics. Bruce’s treatment shines a more sympathetic light on the migrant victims of trafficking than Republicans often do, but Bruce’s focus presages a later melding by Trump of the Latino immigrant and white working classes. That combo was enough in 2024 that Reuters’ summary headline the day after the election was “Trump’s return to power fueled by Hispanic, working-class voter support.”
Today Springsteen hobnobs with America’s wealthiest people to raise money for liberal politicians who have Ivy League educations – the villains in his songs. Trump, meanwhile, campaigned in Youngstown on his way back to the White House, and drew 100,000 people to a beach rally on the Jersey Shore that’s long been Bruce’s base, echoing themes from Springsteen songs in his speeches and making them his own.
Bruce deserves empathy for having to cope with being the muse for the opposite party and he also deserves a wink and a smile, not an insult, from Trump.