Bruce Springsteen talks about a lot of things in his new Time magazine cover story: fame, family, therapy, touring with the E Street Band and the 50 th anniversary of his epochal “Born to Run” album — in fact, the issue appears almost exactly 50 years after his first Time cover (and simultaneous Newsweek one), which heralded him as rock’s bright new hope.
But the most attention-grabbing quotes are his fairly fearless statements about President Donald Trump, whom he initially shied away from criticizing directly (in a 2017 Variety interview) but increasingly has slammed, beginning during his 2018 Broadway residency.
Since Trump’s re-election last year, he and the Boss have traded barbs, with Springsteen calling his administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” and Trump saying the musician is “dumb as a rock,” posting a video mocking him, and groundlessly calling for a investigation into his and other artists’ support of Trump’s 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris.
Springsteen fires back in the new interview, with possibly his strongest statements yet.
“If I’m going to stay true to who I’ve tried to be…I can’t give these guys a free pass,” he says, addressing Trump and his enablers in government. “A lot of people bought into his lies. He doesn’t care about the forgotten — anybody but himself and the multibillionaires who stood behind him on Inauguration Day.” However, he adds, “You have to face the fact that a good number of Americans are simply comfortable with his politics of power and dominance.”
As for Trump’s insults against him, he says, “I absolutely couldn’t care less what he thinks about me… 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.”
Nor does he spare the Democratic party, which has been spectacularly ineffective in the face of Trump and the Republican’s power grabs. “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,” he says. “There is a problem with the language that they’re using and the way they’re trying to reach people.”
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Read the entire interview here.
From Variety US