Man, it’s always great when a beloved rockstar is actually, you know, a decent, good person. Rare, but great. I thank my lucky stars every day that Bruce Springsteen is one of them. The Boss, indeed.
At a surprise weekend appearance at Light of Day Winterfest in Red Bank, New Jersey, America’s most reliable avatar of working-class decency very calmly torched the Trump administration’s ICE deployments.
“We are living through incredibly critical times,” Springsteen told the crowd, before laying out a list of beliefs that apparently now qualify as radical: that no one stands above the law, that federal agents shouldn’t behave like an occupying force, and that you shouldn’t be murdered for exercising your right to protest. He went on to (correctly) describe ICE’s actions in Minneapolis as “Gestapo tactics,” echoed Mayor Jacob Frey’s now-viral directive for ICE to “get the fuck out,” and dedicated his song to Good, a mother of three and American citizen who was shot and killed earlier this month by an ICE agent.
This is, to be clear, the kind of statement that should not be controversial. It was measured, specific, rooted in documented events, and delivered by a 76-year-old man whose entire artistic project has been about dignity, labor, and the ideal of America not humiliating itself.
But since we are living under a President who, as of this morning, sent a pissy, middle-school text to the Norwegian Prime Minister saying that because Norway didn’t grant him the Nobel Peace Prize, he no longer cares about peace, and thus is all too down to resort to war and imperialism in his baffling quest to take over Greenland—well, it should not come as a surprise that the government did not take particularly well to Springsteen’s statements.
Enter the White House, which decided the most effective rebuttal to Springsteen’s remarks was to announce that “no one cares about his bad political opinions.” This is always a fun move: insisting no one cares while very clearly caring enough to issue an official statement. The response went on to scold Springsteen for allegedly not believing in “the power of the law,” a claim that lands with particular irony given that he was criticizing a federal agency currently arguing that murder is legal when a woman turns her steering wheel away from an officer, because apparently that now constitutes “weaponizing her vehicle.”
It’s hard not to marvel at the contrast here. On one side, you have Springsteen—who has spent decades writing songs about flawed systems, broken promises, and people crushed under institutional indifference—standing on a stage in his home state, speaking plainly about state violence and dedicating a song to a dead woman. On the other, you have a press office reflexively defending ICE by deploying the rhetorical equivalent of “actually, you’re wrong and also shut up” while, on the ground, peaceful protestors are being dragged from their cars, beaten to pulps, and arrested—while, in the White House itself, our President drafts juvenile letters that basically read “Give me Greenland or I will invade (Check here for Yes) (Check here for No).”
This is not Springsteen’s first time calling Trump and his administration what they are, and it won’t be his last. He’s been doing this consistently, loudly, and without apology, whether that means calling Trump “the most dangerous candidate for president in my lifetime,” accusing his administration of trampling civil rights abroad, or releasing an EP that opens by describing the U.S. as being run by a “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.” And every time, like clockwork, the administration’s response manages to confirm his point with impressive efficiency. Just another day in the life, I suppose.
