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Bruce Springsteen has made a series of rousing, splenetic speeches castigating Donald Trump and his administration, calling the president “unfit” for office.
In what amounts to one of the most sustained attacks on Trump and American lawmakers from a cultural figure, he made the speeches on stage in Manchester, as he opened his Land of Hope and Dreams tour with the E Street Band.
Introducing the song that gives the tour its name, he said: “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!”
Later, introducing House of a Thousand Guitars, he said: “The last check, the last check on power after the checks and balances of government have failed are the people, you and me. It’s in the union of people around a common set of values now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. So at the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other.”
He then delivered a longer speech ahead of the song My City of Ruins, saying:
There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.
In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.
In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.
They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society.
They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.
They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centres and prisons. This is all happening now.
A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.
The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray.
Springsteen castigated Trump during his first presidential term, saying he was a “threat to our democracy”.
He has long been a Democrat supporter, and a close friend of Barack Obama – he campaigned on each of his presidential campaigns, and the pair created a podcast series together, Renegades: Born in the USA. Springsteen also fronted rallies for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s respective campaigns.
The comments align with a lifetime of songwriting that appraises America in all its ideals and flaws, with albums such as The River and Born in the USA examining poverty, post-Vietnam trauma and blue-collar aspiration with a social documentarian eye. Springsteen also wrote a defining anthem of the 9/11 tragedy, The Rising.
Fans are salivating at the prospect of his next release on 27 June, entitled Tracks II: The Lost Albums – a collection of seven full-length LPs spanning 1983 to 2018, comprising 83 songs that Springsteen recorded but never released.
The Land of Hope and Dreams tour continues in Manchester on 17 and 20 May, and travels across Europe until early July.
