President Donald Trump at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 22, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Like Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Robert De Niro and Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen was among the celebrities who endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign and was disappointed when she narrowly lost to now-President Donald Trump.
The Boss isn't shy about attacking Trump during his concerts, and Trump is angrily railing against him.
Trump insulting celebrities is nothing new. But Rolling Stone's Asawin Suebsaeng, during an appearance on The New Republic's podcast posted on May 21, laid out some reasons why Trump's recent attacks on Springsteen and other celebrities are taking an increasingly dangerously "authoritarian" turn.
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Trump, Suebsaeng emphasized during the interview, is going way beyond disagreeing with Springsteen politically — he is calling for a criminal investigation of him.
Suebsaeng told New Republic podcast host Greg Sargent, "All Bruce Springsteen did was exercise his American constitutional right to free speech. He was doing it abroad while on tour — but all Donald Trump was reacting to there was Bruce Springsteen using constitutionally protected free speech to say: I don't like Donald Trump or what he is currently doing to the country…. And Donald Trump's reaction to that was to essentially issue a fatwa against Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, and Beyoncé Knowles."
Sargent noted Suebsaeng's use the word "fatwa," pointing out that "it’s almost as if he's a radical cleric or something issuing a command to a whole army of followers out there." And Suebsaeng responded that Trump is leading an "authoritarian movement" that has a lot of supporters in the U.S.
Suebsaeng told Sargent, "Bruce Springsteen said something that pissed him off just a little bit. So he is someone who (Trump) has to threaten with a major federal investigation — a criminal investigation — and he is a head on which Donald Trump needs to bring the massive weight of the entire federal apparatus to crack down. It is a crusade that Donald Trump has been launching against the First Amendment and free expression in this country since at least his 2016 campaign. And it has only gotten worse since he became president the first time — and much, much, much worse and more bloodthirsty and more authoritarian since he’s become president the second time."
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Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link and read the transcript here.