Bruce Springsteen probably faded from my regular music rotation in the mid-1990s. About or around Tom Joad or so. I’ve checked in occasionally. The Rising got some airtime. Wrecking Ball too, but nothing ever again with the intensity I had from the time a friend introduced me to Darkness on the Edge of Town through to about, Nebraska or so. (An early devotee views Born in the USA, Springsteen’s biggest selling album, as the step up onto the bandwagon.)

A musical timeline, I guess, tracing the pure zeal of youth.

Springsteen caught my attention again recently with his war of words with Donald Trump. While on tour in Europe, he told an audience: “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.” The President, a noted Village People enthusiast, responded in typical pithy, Wildean fashion: “Never liked him, never liked his music or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy—just a pushy, obnoxious JERK… This dried out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back in the Country.”

This clash—now relegated to the sidelines, overshadowed by the current Trump-Musk tête-à-tête and the sight of National Guard troops ordered into the streets of Los Angeles by the President—reverberated in The Boss’s home state of New Jersey where a Trump supporting bar owner cancelled a show by a Springsteen cover band, not caring for their native son’s politics and, perhaps, concerned about the negative impact on his business located in a red part of a blue state.

As The Guardian points out, Springsteen’s brush with politics is not particularly new. Back in the Reagan era, Born in the USA was released smack dab in the middle of the 1984 Presidential campaign. The Reagan team touted the music, especially the chest-beating chant of the title track as a ‘message of hope’. ‘Jingoistic’ I remember a friend calling it during a political disagreement we were having about the song. ‘I had a brother at Khe Sanh,’ I lyric quoted back at him. ‘Fighting off them Viet Cong. They’re still there, he’s all gone’. A snippet that remains with me forty years on whenever the song comes to mind.

A mere difference of opinion and interpretation back then compared to what seems like a social and cultural schism now. Despite the president’s ‘Radical Left Politics’ carp, Springsteen’s political evolution reflects a general post-war liberalism that hardly seems militant or extreme. As a singer-songwriter of his generation, there’s always been, at least, a thematic influence of the likes of Woody Guthrie. You don’t have to scratch very far under the surface of his lyrics to recognize that. The hollowing out of industrial America, the crushing weight of the unrealized American Dream, were sentiments pretty clear in his songs from the very beginning of his career when his debut album came out during the Nixon administration.

His overt politics, however, his endorsements, hardly break from Democratic Party orthodoxy. Obama. Biden. Kamala Harris.

A veritable Who’s Who of the status quo.

What is radical right now is Springsteen’s refusal to clam up and shut down in the face of Trump’s histrionic blowholing and flatulent threatening. While the automatic reflex to the administration’s first four months of axe-wielding and footstomping from celebrities, corporations, educational institutes and other organizations has been total capitulation at worst, notable silence at best, Springsteen’s stuck out his chin and lifted his middle fingers in open defiance and pointed condemnation.

If one’s so inclined, it’s easy, I guess, to dismiss such pushback.

What’s the man got to lose at this point?

He’s rich. He’s an icon. He’s as untouchable as anyone could be in our current situation. It’s not as if he’ll be nabbed at the border when he returns from Europe and bundled off to a Nicaraguan jail.

In all likelihood.

Record sales may slip. Concert attendance may sag. Cover bands will be de-gigged. But at this stage in his career, he’ll probably be able to take the hit. It is also possible that his anti-Trump stance could give him a boost from those starved for words and gestures of resistance coming from those with major public platforms. That scenario, a win-win for him if any of this was purely a business roll of the dice on his part.

The real significance of Springsteen’s blunt assessment of the U.S. regime is that, despite Trump’s attempt to paint him out on the extreme left, Springsteen’s voice is a moderate one, stating truths about a radically lawless, authoritarian White House running roughshod over the Constitution, the Congress and international order. He is simply saying what every other elected official, appointed justice, CEO, member of the media, anyone with even just a flicker of democratic spirit, should be yelling, instead of trying to normalize or shrug off such deranged Executive behaviour as some sort of natural give-and-take, back-and-forth along the political spectrum.

‘Rise up!’ Bruce sang in his song My City of Ruins from the 2002 album he released in response to another existential moment in U.S. history, 9/11. Words and sentiments he seems to be exhorting once again in the face of what may be even a greater threat to the country he was born in.