It didn’t take long for the White House to weigh in on Bruce Springsteen’s North American tour announcement.
In his announcement, Springsteen said he and the E Street Band are hitting the road “in celebration and in defence of America – American democracy, American freedom, our American Constitution and our sacred American dream”, adding that those things are “under attack by our wannabe king and his rogue government in Washington, D.C”.
Per Rolling Stone, the White House’s team responded with a statement packed full of bad puns and veiled insults. Senior Communications Director Steven Cheung leaned heavily on Springsteen song titles in his retort, dismissing the rock icon as a “loser” and suggesting his best days are behind him – all because of what he called “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
“When this loser Springsteen comes back home to his own City of Ruins in his head, he’ll realize his Glory Days are behind him and his fans have left him Out in the Street, putting him in a Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out because he has a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his brain,” Cheung wrote.
Springsteen has not been shy about criticising Donald Trump and his administration in recent years, and earlier this year released the protest song “Streets of Minneapolis”, which condemned the government’s hard-line immigration enforcement policies. At the time, the White House brushed off that track as “random” and “irrelevant”.
He also dedicated “The Promised Land” to the memory of Renée Good during a mid-January performance in New Jersey and decried the “Gestapo tactics” that he said have resulted in a climate where citizens can be “murdered for exercising your American right to protest”. Then in February, he joined Tom Morello on stage at an anti-ICE protest concert.
The planned tour is set to begin on March 31st in Minneapolis and will wrap up on May 27th in Washington, D.C. – two locations that seem deliberately chosen amid the ongoing political tension between the rock legend and the Trump administration.
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