Bruce Springsteen, the rock n’ roll embodiment of the Everyman, minced no words when asked his thoughts on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. “The republic is under siege by a moron, basically,” the singer told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview preview published Friday.
“Without overstating it, it’s a tragedy for our democracy,” he continued.
“The ideas he’s moving to the mainstream are all very dangerous ideas—white nationalism and the alt-right movement,” Springsteen added. “Once you let those genies out of the bottle, they don’t go back in so easy, if they go back in at all.”
Echoing the progressive argument that Trump’s popularity—much like the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote—is a reaction to the global, capitalist system, Springsteen said that he believes “that there’s a price being paid for not addressing the real cost of the deindustrialization and globalization that has occurred in the United States for the past 35, 40 years and how it’s deeply affected people’s lives and deeply hurt people to where they want someone who says they have a solution.”
“And Trump’s thing,” he added, “is simple answers to very complex problems. Fallacious answers to very complex problems. And that can be very appealing.”
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