The recent spectacle of Donald Trump dancing to the beat at a political rally has reaffirmed his love for music. But it is also clear that ‘music’ hates Trump. Famous musicians from Mick Jagger to Green Day have outlined their opposition to their music being used at his rallies. Given the latter’s famous anti-war anthem ‘American Idiot’, this is not particularly surprising. But there is one musician whose rejection of Trump is ostensibly incongruous, given the overlapping of their respective fan bases – Bruce Springsteen.
Long seen as the voice of the working class, especially the white, blue collar working class, the lyrics of the ‘Boss’ seems perfectly suited to the themes of loss and destruction on which Trump rallies almost invariably seek to draw. Yet Springsteen has openly spoken out against Trump, and endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, performing with her and Obama on stage in Georgia at a Democratic rally on 24 October. In the divergence between seemingly natural bedfellows – the Trump rally attendee, largely white and working class, and Bruce Springsteen – is the divergence of two competing visions for the working class in modern America.
In a sense, by both putting the working class as central to their appeal, whether political or musical, Trump and Springsteen imbue the working-class experience with meaning and dignity, by focusing on the profound sense of loss those communities feel, as Simon Clark argues in his thesis ‘This American Skin’: Bruce Springsteen and the Complexity of American Identity. These are the white, blue-collar voters whom Trump promises to restore to their industrial heyday – in part by heavily increasing tariffs– and to whom Springsteen speaks directly in some of his most famous songs, such as ‘The River’ and ‘Born in the U.S.A’.
Moving into the twenty-first century and in the wake of the financial crash, Springsteen’s album Wrecking Ball seems to focus on the Trump-style businessmen, with his characters placing the blame for their economic woes clearly in Wall Street. Indeed, on a personal level Springsteen seems a much more ‘authentic’ voice of the working class than Trump does, having grown up in poverty in Cleveland and south-central Pennsylvania. But in a sense, this does not really matter: in positioning himself in opposition to a ‘deep state’ that the working classes feel to have cheated them Trump is as ‘authentic’ as he needs to be. At the same time, ascribing working-class ‘authenticity’ to Springsteen’s music is an over-simplification of what is a very diverse opus.
Crucially, where Trump and Springsteen diverge is in their treatment of the modern working class. While Springsteen is synonymous with his 1980s output focusing on the typical white, male, blue-collar worker who is suffering under Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ economics and losing The Ties That Bind, overall he is more varied than that. Later albums have diversified his depictions of the working class to include a more non-white, female, and service-based understanding of deprived America. Meanwhile, Trump has doubled down on Springsteen’s 80s working-class archetype, driving home a message of white and male grievance that he hopes will secure him victory in the post-industrial Rust Belt as well as elsewhere.
Trump’s commitment to protect and boost American industry through tariffs, as well as strengthen domestic coal and gas production with his plan to eschew any climate change agenda, gives him a message that resonates with a disillusioned base as much as Springsteen’s music. In fact, the part inspiration for Springsteen’s ‘Youngstown’ from The Ghost of Tom Joad, discovered by the New York Times, is an ardent Trump supporter. But Springsteen has broadened his working-class advocacy to reflect the changing nature of the American working class itself. If Trump seeks political capital in promoting the grievance-based narrative of one particular working class, Springsteen’s songwriting represents a more inclusive focus on suffering and loss.
This is nowhere more evident than in the much-discussed gender divide that is coming to characterise this election: women disproportionately favour Harris, while men – in large part due to working class men – favour Trump. It is at rallies that Trump’s attempt to capitalise on this imbalance becomes clear, with ‘masculine’ figures such as UFC boss Dana White and wrestler Hulk Hogan making appearances. Without a doubt they present a more uncomplicated version of the male American than Springsteen, but why does this matter in the artificial, performative event of the political rally?
The very fact of Springsteen’s performance at a Democratic rally in Georgia makes clear the diversity of the vision that Harris to presenting to America, in contrast to Trump’s essentialised, patriarchal vision embodied in White and Hogan. Through Springsteen she is making clear, or at least trying to make clear, that this is the party of the disgruntled white working class as much as the liberal California professional, of the proud man as much as the proud woman embodied in the performance of Beyoncé.
Harris’s preparedness to accept diversity, the Democratic rally, and this performance literally set the stage for what anthropologist Victor Turner called ‘antistructural liminality’ in his essay ‘Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, Ritual’. Turner’s theory captures the experience of cultural performance which exists in the ‘cracks of society’. Its fleeting and indetermined nature allows the audience to ‘generate and store a plurality of alternative models for living’. The uncertainty of this moment of performance acts as a ‘realm of pure possibility’ which can found conventional social and political life. More than reflecting the variety of the Democrat coalition, Springsteen’s performance participates in it, realising the collision of different American narratives that embodies what Turner describes as the ‘dissolution of fixed categories’ necessary for a diverse society in his other essay ‘Liminality and the Performative Genres’.
On the other hand, at his rallies Trump appeals not to the hidden ‘other’ in relation to his audience, but rather seeks to home in on and exploit their particularist prejudices, not exposing them to the other side of a binary so much as guiding them to a more extreme part of their own side, taking pride in exclusivism. His recent Madison Square Garden rally, in which comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made jokes based on a slew of racist stereotypes, playing into the prominent nativist strand of MAGA politics, made this clear. This is reflected in the Vice-President choices for each side: while in the figure of Tim Walz Harris sought to reach those voters potentially turned off by her urbanity and professionalism, with someone rooted in the folksier ‘other’, Trump doubled down on his MAGA base with the more ideologically dogmatic Vance.
That both Trump and Springsteen have attempted to give a platform to the working-class American voice suggests it would have been natural for Springsteen to perform at Trump rallies. Had Springsteen been a Trump supporter, he may well have done. But had that been the case perhaps Springsteen’s depictions of the United States in his music would not have changed to reflect a changing, diversifying society, one to which the Democratic Party now turns to form its potentially winning political coalition. Springsteen performing at a Trump rally could in principle offer the audience of a Trump rally that same ‘antistructural liminality’, in which conventional views of culture, politics and society are challenged and alternatives are offered. But while the modern Republican Party is so overwhelmingly dominated by the totalising figure of Trump – who has structured the Party around him – this seems but a theoretical conjecture
It is easy for Trump to portray the many musicians opposed to his use of their music in the strict binary, as ‘The Establishment’ in permanent opposition to him. But if Trump’s rallies and the music played there embody an essentialised vision of America, he does not reject one single Democratic ‘Establishment’. Rather, he rejects the very social and cultural diversity on which the Democrats are hoping, once again, to base a winning coalition on 5th November. Perhaps no one is more emblematic of the Republican Party’s rejection of diversity than Bruce Springsteen, who hails from the MAGA heartlands but whose musical journey has mirrored America’s.
Image Credit: EJ Hersom / DoD News