So now Donald Trump wants to cancel his “Freedom 250” concerts. Musical artists, who were obviously lied to by Trump adjutants when convinced to agree to perform, have spent the last few days not only backing out of the shows but going out of their way to emphasize that they were misled about the nature and true purpose of the events. Trump, in his churlish and childish way, said on Saturday he didn’t want these crybabies (“overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain”) singing at his rallies anyway.
Meanwhile, last Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen played a sold-out show in Washington’s Nationals Park (around 41,000 people) for his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour. As you’ve no doubt heard, he opened the show—and he seems to be opening every date on the tour—with a sermonette about the “reckless, racist, incompetent, treasonous” occupant of the White House before he launched into a cover of Edwin Starr’s 1970 chart-topping hit “War.”
So, fate having handed us an interesting and useful juxtaposition here, it seems on point to ask: Which of these events represents this country’s better self? Okay, it’s obvious that I’m going to answer that by saying Springsteen. But there’s more to the answer. The moment gives us the opportunity to reflect on assumptions the media makes about who is a “real” American: how wrong those assumptions are, how those assumptions have helped elevate and legitimize Trump, and how they distort our political discourse generally.
The lazy media assumption, of course, is that working-class and mostly white Trump supporters are somehow the real Americans. This is driven by some weird psychological combination of guilt and condescension—guilt on the part of educated elites that they don’t know how to earn a living by the honest sweat of their brow, and condescension because it makes a number of assumptions about these people and their “simple” lives and values.
Hence, the still-endless appetite on the part of editors for sending reporters out to some red redoubt in middle America to see what the “real” people think. Why this is considered to be “news,” while sending reporters to blue areas to gauge the depth of anti-Trump rage is generally not, stacks the deck heavily in Trump’s favor.
There’s a key distinction to made here between what it means to be a good person and what it means to be a good American. I’m sure most Trump supporters, the outright racists aside, are decent people. If I had a flat tire and they drove by, I imagine they’d be just as likely as Trump foes to stop and help. The chances that some Trump supporter, somewhere, did you a good turn at some point in the last decade is very high.
But being a good American is entirely different. To be a good American, you have to believe in a few principles and ideas—and you must reject certain other ideas. Chief among those that a good American is compelled to abjure are the ideas that 1) the rule of law is not sacrosanct, but fungible and conditional, and 2) that the United States is or should be a Christian nation.
I’d say many or most Trump supporters fall short on one or both of these points. And so by definition, they’re not good Americans. Good Americans believe devoutly that the rule of law applies to everyone. And good Americans know very well that this is explicitly not a Christian nation and never was. Go read the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson himself in 1779, and figure it out.
Anyway, back to the concerts: Trump’s whining about these musicians is comical and pathetic. The whole thing is a mystery. Whoever decided in the first place that America needed to hear performances from some groups that had a few hits 30 years ago is baffling. And let’s face it, it’s not as if Trump couldn’t have gotten some friendly stars out of the Branson circuit. Maybe he just got tired of Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood.
With two-thirds of the country now disapproving of Trump, I’d say there are many millions of real Americans in the anti-Trump camp. About 25 percent of American adults self-identify as part of the MAGA movement. That’s a small minority. Meanwhile, Springsteen’s favorable-to-unfavorables, according to YouGov, are 53 to 14.
Mind you, even The Boss doesn’t really represent today’s America. He’s a 76-year-old white guy whose best album, in my humble view, came out 53 years ago (The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle). What I know about the pop culture of today I know through my kid, and it isn’t a lot, but I do love, say, Olivia Rodrigo. She’s a rocker (“Brutal” is awesome!). She’s very anti-Trump. And she’s most definitely a real American. She grew up in California’s Inland Empire, the daughter of a family therapist and a schoolteacher, and she taught herself the guitar and made it on her own and as far as I know doesn’t whine about paying too much in taxes. In fact, daughter of a therapist that she is, she pays for everyone who works on her tours to have access to mental health services.
So she and her generation are the future, but for now, God bless Springsteen for taking it upon himself to get out there and the be voice of anti-Trump America—which, again, is most of America. Most of America hates or at least disapproves of his childishness, his self-regard, his lying, his racism, his cruelty, his totally retrograde ideas about manhood (and for that matter womanhood), and his operatically corrupt self-dealing, which people appear finally and blessedly to be noticing.
And finally, let’s hope that by 2028, with Trump (we presume) heading to retirement, the media finally wake up from this spell and figure out that real Americans are to be found not just in Youngstown, Ohio, and Topeka, Kansas, but in diverse cities and university towns where people work just as hard as anyone else and believe in a much better America than the one Trump wants to conjure. They’re the people who have not been blinded by Trump’s false light.
