How Bruce Springsteen is rallying Americans to defend the real USA against Donald Trump
Bruce Springsteen’s unexpected US tour is his way of protesting against Donald Trump
Tomorrow morning I will wake up in a Travelodge in Kill Devil Hills, a seaside resort on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Despite its name, the town is described as a “nice place” to live. Its violent crime rate is just one-sixth of the national average.
The hills are actually large, shifting sand dunes, and local legend has it that it takes its name, not from Satanic rituals, but from the barrels of potent Kill Devil rum which regularly washed ashore from shipwrecks in the 1700s.
“Are you mad?” asked one, usually calm, friend when I told her of my plans for a three-week road trip in the Southern states of America. “Watch out for ICE,” said another as she emailed me the sorry tale of a British woman detained last year because her husband’s tourist visa had expired.
“She was shackled and locked up for six weeks,” warned my friend. Most others simply said “Trump”, as if invoking the 47th President of the United States of America was reason enough to avoid the most interesting, infuriating, and yes, still the most important country in the world.
READ MORE: Why Nigel Farage’s subservient attitude towards Donald Trump should be a warning to patriotic voters
“America is not Trump, and Trump is not America” is my stock reply. By 2029, he will be banished to Mar-a-Largo where he can retell old war stories to the rich sycophants who pay hundreds of thousands a year to sit at his feet. If he doesn’t blow the world to kingdom come first, of course.
My husband and I are in the US because we love this country, in all its complexities and contradictions, from liberal New York to conservative Nebraska. Every town and city across its 3.8 million square miles has a story.
The dunes of Kill Devil Hills are where, on the morning of Thursday, December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the world’s first powered flight. Their fourth and best attempt that day lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. My Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to Raleigh took seven-and-a-half hours over 3,600 miles, and was only made possible by those brothers from Dayton, Ohio, who are arguably more significant figures in the development of the modern world and the global economy than Elon Musk believes he is today.
Later in trip we will visit Macon, Georgia, where a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line. It is where the influential soul singer Otis Redding grew up. He was tragically killed in 1967, aged only 26, when his plane crashed on landing into Madison, Wisconsin.
It is also the birthplace of Little Richard, who if not the king of rock’n’roll, was most definitely its crown prince. And James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, began his career in this Southern city whose population is only a few thousand more than Dundee’s.
And on Saturday May 2, we will join a crowd of almost 20,000 in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena to spend three hours with Bruce Springsteen, described recently by Trump as a “dried up old prune” with a “horrible and incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
Springsteen’s unexpected US tour is his protest against what he describes as Trump’s authoritarian reach. The 20 gigs are more old-school revivalist meeting than rock concert, with Springsteen the preacher reawakening the founding spirit of America, which he argues Trump is determined to extinguish.
Each night, between his hymns of hardship and redemption, he preaches: “This White House is destroying the American idea and our reputation around the world. To many, we are no longer looked upon as an often imperfect but strong defender of democracy standing for the global good.
“We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are now, to many, America the reckless, unpredictable, predatory rogue nation… So join us and let’s fight for the America that we love.”
Can a multimillionaire rock star, whose concert tickets cost hundreds of dollars, save America from its worst self, or is the nation founded on the principles of equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness doomed to destroy the dream of its Founding Fathers to fulfil Trump’s nightmare vision?
On Monday, King Charles arrives in Washington to celebrate the 250th anniversary year of America’s independence. The founding document of this new country, passed by its Congress on July 4, 1776, declared that government derives its powers from the consent of the people. It goes on “… whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” Or as Springsteen argues, “let’s fight for the America we love”.
There are now two Americas. One where its people believe that Trump and the Maga movement are the vanguard of a 21st-century revolution that will realise their dream of a socially conservative, economically liberal America First.
The other is the promised land evoked by Springsteen and described by the country’s first black president, Barack Obama, in 2004: “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.”
It is eight years since I spent any time in the country that gave the world Elvis Presley, the iPhone, modern liberal democracy, and now Trump. Is it still the land of hope and dreams where faith in its ideals will be rewarded, or is the great cause of the United States of America lost to oligarchs and tyrants?
Are we gazing on America’s “chimes of freedom flashing”, as Bob Dylan wrote in 1964 and Springsteen sings in 2026, or are they stuttering to silence? Whatever its fate, America still matters to all of us.
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