“Bruce Springsteen has spoken out against the White House again after President Donald Trump called him a ‘dried-out prune’ on social media. Speaking in Manchester, England, the musician criticized the government for the second time during his Land of Hopes and Dreams tour, despite Trump previously biting back.” — Newsweek, May 18, 2025
I’m a middle-aged guy from Jersey. A freedom-loving, meat-and-potatoes family guy. A Springsteen guy. A Trump guy.
I’ve seen the Boss forty-seven times and own one of the largest collections of Springsteen bootlegs in North America. I’ve also been a registered Republican since I was old enough to vote and was part of the great Gen X wave that brought Trump back into office.
If you’re thinking that Springsteen’s empathy for the working class and exploration of the runaway American dream are about as far as you can get from President Trump’s plans to make America great again, well, my leftist daughter would agree with you.
“Have you actually listened to the lyrics of ‘Born in the USA’ or ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ or, like, anything on Nebraska, Dad?” she asked me last year, before the election, when she was still speaking to me. Four years at Liberal University and all she learned is how to be a pain in my ass, but I just smiled.
I’ll never tell her what I really love about the Boss: all the songs about sex. On those first four albums, young Bruce was doing it everywhere: underneath the boardwalk, in an old abandoned beach house, possibly even in an ambulance. He was dancing in the dark, proving it all night, and teenage me couldn’t get enough.
Sure, I know Springsteen is a bleeding-heart liberal and has written a ton of political songs. I get that he intended “Born in the USA” as an indictment of our country, not a celebration. Doesn’t bother me. You know how people talk about separating the art from the artist? I believe in separating the lyrics from a good bop. Hell yeah, I was born in the USA! Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey! Bru-u-u-u-u-u-uce! I feel no need to go deeper than that. When Bruce tells those little stories between songs at his shows, anything that sounds like it might have some kind of “woke” point, I usually go get a hot dog and a couple of beers.
But this latest brouhaha has been impossible to miss, and I feel like I’m being asked to take sides. Touring in Europe, the Boss called our president “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous,” and Trump called Springsteen “a pushy obnoxious JERK” and a “dried-out prune.” He also hinted that the Boss might not be let back into the country. I fully expected a gloating text from my daughter, but it never came.
“You know Wendy’s not speaking to you,” my wife said, and reminded me that our daughter lost her job in one of those DOGE cuts. The look she gave me as she left the room suggested she thought I was, at least in part, to blame.
I wanted nothing more than to blast one of my favorite bootlegs—perhaps Bruce at the Nassau Coliseum in 1980, or Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2008—but those songs would just reinforce the choice I had to make. How could I give up Springsteen’s world of hot girls and cars? Of working men, so much like the working men and women who bust their asses in the business I inherited from my father?
But I also love the things Trump loves: money, and the promise of returning to a simpler time, when men were men, women were girls, and pronouns were something you barely remembered from fourth-grade English. Sure, the president can be petty and a bully. But also my business will make millions if he wipes out some of the EPA rules he’s promised to get rid of.
So I guess if I have to choose between a Tenth Avenue freeze-out and Trump’s Fifth Avenue hypothetical, I’ve gotta side with the leader of the free world. If I keep riding the Trump train, I’ll be able to afford the bachelor pad I see waiting for me in my future, and I’ll decorate it with Springsteen memorabilia should the Boss ever see the error of his ways.