Audio: Bruce Springsteen on Donald Trump’s Appeal to the Worst of America

Bruce Springsteen was on WTF with Marc Maron earlier today and had some spot-on observations about Trump and his voters. Here are a few highlights. Needless to say, working-class hero and superb musician/poet/etc. Springsteen expresses my own views and feelings about where we are right now perfectly, far more articulately than I ever could.

• Springsteen and Maron discuss how Trump is basically the High School principal who sics the bad guys on you.
• Maron. “Are you scared now?” Springsteen. “Yeah. Yeah, of course, how could you not be?” Maron. “Have you felt this fear before?” Springsteen. “No. I’ve felt disgust before, but never the kind of fear that you fear now. It’s as simple as the fear of is someone simply competent enough to do this particular job. Forget about where they are ideologically; do they simply have the pure competence to be put in a position of such responsibility?“
• Maron. “It’s sort of like they elected the most insecure, needy, volatile dude to do this job...I don’t think it embodies strength to a lot of people, but it does embody f*** you…Who you voting for? The f*** you guy…Once adversity tips into hopelessness…and you’ve written those characters…When the hopelessness has no place to go, this is where you’re at…Where’s your empathy around that?…You have that moment when you’re like, who the f*** are you, who are you, I thought I knew you.” Springsteen. “I mean, I understand how he got elected.  I mean, if you were affected deeply by deindustrialization and globalization…and you have been left behind, and somebody comes along and tells you ‘I’m going to bring all the jobs back; don’t worry about it, they’re all coming back.’  “And you’re concerned about America changing, the browning of American — ‘I’m going to build a wall.’…You’re worried about terrorism in the United States, ‘I’m going to register the Muslims’…These are all very simplistic but very powerful and simple ideas; I mean, they’re lies…But if you’ve struggled for the past 30-40 years…somebody comes along and offers you something else, particularly after you feel you’ve been failed by the two parties, it’s a compelling choice. It just appeals to your worst angels…”
• Q. “And what’s your biggest fear of it and we enter it?” A. “I suppose would be that a lot of the worst things and the worst things of what he appealed to come to fruition. When you let that genie out of the bottle – bigotry, racism…intolerance, when you let those things out of the bottle, they don’t go back in the bottle that easily if they go back in at all; whether it’s a rise in hate crimes, people feeling they have license to speak and behave in ways that previously were considered unAmerican and ARE unAmerican; that’s what he’s appealing to….The country feels very estranged, you feel very estranged from your countrymen…And he hasn’t even taken office yet…And if you also look at who he’s been picking for his cabinet, it doesn’t speak very well for what’s coming up. You know, those are all things that I’m very frightened of and waiting to see play out, and all you can do is say well I’m going to do my best to…hey America is still America, I believe in its ideals, and I’m going to do my best to play my very very small part in maintaining those ideals.”