SAN FRANCISCO, California—Bruce Springsteen looked better than ever when he took the stage Monday night for the fifth stop on his anti-Trump Land of Hope and Dreams tour.
For three hours straight, the rock legend relentlessly hammered the president and his regime to loud cheers from the politically aligned crowd at the Chase Center in downtown San Francisco.
As he has done in Minneapolis, Portland, and Los Angeles, Springsteen opened his marathon set by directly denouncing the “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration.” He then launched into a cover of The Temptations’ “War (What Is It Good For?)” before treating the crowd to his oft-misunderstood anthem “Born in the U.S.A.”
An early sign of just how fired up his fans are against MAGA came during Springsteen’s newest composition, “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he debuted less than three months ago in the wake of the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good by immigration officers in that city earlier this year.
Unlike that furious first rendition at a “Defend Minnesota” rally in January, the song has now taken on a more elegiac and somber tone—at least in the beginning.
But then came the moment when Springsteen got to the verse that begins, “Now they say they’re here to uphold the law / But they trample on our rights / If your skin is Black or brown, my friend / You can be questioned or deported on sight.” He then repeated the line, “In our chants of...” four times to fully drive home the call-and-response, with the crowd shouting “ICE OUT NOW!” louder and louder with each refrain.
It was one of several moments that would infuriate Trump and his cadre of loyal goons. Another came when Springsteen listed off the administration’s many atrocities ahead of his song “My City of Ruins.” Written as a tribute to Asbury Park, New Jersey, the song took on new meaning after the September 11th attacks. It now seems to sum up the state of the entire country’s reputation in the wake of Trump.
The war of words between Trump and Springsteen has been steadily ramping up over the past few weeks. But Monday’s show was the first since the president inexplicably posted an obviously doctored photo of the rocker’s face with the caption, “Bruce Springsteen prior to plastic surgery???”
As Jimmy Kimmel put it in his monologue Monday night, after seeing Springsteen in L.A. over the weekend, “Beyond how scary it is that our president doesn’t know the difference between real and fake, beyond how petty and childish this is, especially with everything that’s going on, how oblivious is this man? Has he looked at himself in the mirror ever?”
“Implying that Bruce had plastic surgery, while every weird rich person downstairs at Mar-a-Lago is walking around with more plastic in them than a sea turtle’s stomach,” Kimmel added. “This is how out of it he is.”
Springsteen, 76, didn’t deign to respond to that low-hanging fruit, but his indefatigable performance spoke volumes about his physical state compared to the 79-year-old president.
Trump may possess some ungodly energy on occasion, but it’s impossible to imagine the elderly man who dozes through Cabinet meetings delivering the physical tour-de-force that Springsteen manages to pull off night after night.
At right around the three-hour mark, after an encore that included blistering versions of “Born to Run,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” Springsteen finally sat down at the edge of the stage. “That’s still fun,” he admitted with a smile.
Then, he returned to the real message he wanted to leave the audience with. “We have a president who says he wishes nothing but ill upon those that he disagrees with and who disagree with him,” he said. “I don’t want to live that way.”
He urged the thousands of people assembled in the stadium to go home after the show and “hold your loved ones close,” and then in the morning, “find a way to take some aggressive, peaceful action to defend our country’s ideals.”
By the time he and the band broke into Bob Dylan’s protest song “Chimes of Freedom” to end the night, it was almost enough to make a cynic feel hopeful about America’s future.
