Springsteen: Trump doesn't grasp what being an American means

Bruce Springsteen: Trump ‘doesn’t have a grasp’ of what it means to be an American

Oct. 25, 2019 9:01 AM PT

A rally speech isn’t going to get Bruce Springsteen to change his opinion about President Trump.

“We’re living in a frightening time,” Springsteen said in an interview with Gayle King for “CBS This Morning” on Thursday.

King had mentioned a speech Trump made at a rally in Minneapolis two weeks ago.

“I didn’t need Beyoncé and Jay-Z. And I didn’t need little Bruce Springsteen and all of these people” to boost his crowd sizes, the president said.

Springsteen just laughed, saying he was “not really” surprised that POTUS had invoked his name long after the 2016 presidential race, during which the musician had campaigned for Hillary Clinton.

“The stewardship of the nation has been thrown away to somebody who doesn’t have a clue as to what that means,” Springsteen said. “And unfortunately, we have somebody who I feel doesn’t have a grasp of the deep meaning of what it means to be an American.”

Despite a fan base made up of blue-collar Americans — many of whom Trump won to his side — Springsteen has a long history of supporting Democratic candidates.

He campaigned for Sen. John Kerry in 2004, endorsed President Obama in 2008 and 2012 and played at Obama’s second inauguration. That said, at the end of last year he said he thought Trump would win reelection in 2020.

“I don’t see anyone out there at the moment ... the man who can beat Trump, or the woman who can beat Trump,” Springsteen told the Sunday Times about the then-potential 2020 Democratic field. “You need someone who can speak some of the same language [as Trump] ... and the Democrats don’t have an obvious, effective presidential candidate.”

But he told Esquire around the same time that he thought the country would “survive” the Trump presidency.

“The founding fathers were pretty good at confronting their fears and the fears of the country. And it’s the old cliché where geniuses built the system so an idiot could run it. We are completely testing that theory at this very moment. I do believe we’ll survive Trump,” he said.

“But I don’t know if I see a unifying figure on the horizon. That worries me. Because the partisanship and the country being split down the middle is something that’s gravely dangerous.”

Springsteen’s new concert film, “Western Stars” (the companion doc to his latest album of the same name), was released in theaters Friday.