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For the European tour, Springsteen revised his set list, swapping meditations on mortality from his 2020 album Letter to You for fierce political resistance—beginning with “Land of Hope and Dreams,” his gospel-infused anthem of inclusion and redemption, and closing with Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom,” a hymn of solidarity with the oppressed. “He just got pissed off enough to want to change the theme,” longtime E Street guitarist Steven Van Zandt says. It was a few months into Donald Trump’s norm-shattering second term, and Springsteen was among the first artists of his stature to speak out so forcefully. “If I’m going to stay true to who I’ve tried to be,” he tells me, “I can’t give these guys a free pass.” Politics had long shadowed him: to his fury, “Born in the U.S.A.,” a protest against the neglect of Vietnam veterans, was hijacked by Ronald Reagan and recast as a flag-saluting celebration. “To understand that song,” he says, “you’ve got to hold two contradictory thoughts at once: that you can feel betrayed by your country and still love it.”

Over the years, he has returned to political and social themes, from the AIDS epidemic and the plight of migrant workers, to deindustrialization and the ravages of war. Critics have mocked the irony of a rock star traveling by private jet while singing about the working poor. He owns the contradiction—“a rich man in a poor man’s shirt,” as he writes in “Better Days.” Today, the joke is old, but something else haunts him: the very people he sings about have flocked to Trump. “A lot of people bought into his lies,” he says. “He doesn’t care about the forgotten anybody but himself and the multibillionaires who stood behind him on Inauguration Day.” Springsteen struggles with another truth: “You have to face the fact that a good number of Americans are simply comfortable with his politics of power and dominance.”

After Springsteen’s speech, Trump called him “highly overrated” and posted a meme depicting himself striking the rocker with a golf ball. When I bring this up, Springsteen laughs. “I absolutely couldn’t care less what he thinks about me.” What he doesn’t laugh about is the state of the nation. “He’s the living personification of what the 25th Amendment and impeachment were for. If Congress had any guts, he’d be consigned to the trash heap of history.” Nor does he spare Democrats: “We’re desperately in need of an effective alternative party, or for the Democratic Party to find someone who can speak to the majority of the nation. There is a problem with the language that they’re using and the way they’re trying to reach people.”

Springsteen has spent decades exploring the gulf between the American Dream and the American reality, the widening economic divides that would power Trump’s rise: from the hollowing out of Rust Belt cities, conjured in his 1984 song “My Hometown,” to the populist rage of his 2012 album about the Great Recession, Wrecking Ball. “Those conditions are ripe for a demagogue,” he says. “Those things have got to be addressed if we want to live in the America of our better angels. I still believe it’s there, but it’s struggling.”

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