Trump Bashes Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift on Truth Social

The Washington Post

15:02 JST, May 17, 2025

President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Friday to disparage Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift – both vocal critics of his policies – almost two days after Springsteen condemned Trump during a concert in England.

This is not the first time Trump has criticized celebrities such as Springsteen and Swift, both of whom supported Kamala Harris during her 2024 presidential campaign. But Trump’s recent social media posts are among his first insulting A-listers since his return to office. During his first term, the president frequently brawled with high-profile entertainers including Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro.

Springsteen railed against the Trump administration in three statements made during opening night of his Land of Hope and Dreams Tour in Manchester, England.

Before performing “Land of Hope and Dreams” Wednesday night, he called the administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous.” Ahead of singing “House of a Thousand Guitars,” he said “the union of people around a common set of values” are “all that stands between democracy and authoritarianism.” As he introduced “My City of Ruins,” Springsteen called Trump an “unfit president” in a longer speech criticizing what he described as “very weird, strange and dangerous s— going on” in the United States.

“They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands,” Springsteen said. “They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”

He also criticized attacks on free speech, the abandonment of “the world’s poorest children” and the rollback of “historic civil rights legislation.”

Trump, in turn, lambasted Springsteen’s political beliefs – and his appearance.

“Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy – Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning.

He also called Springsteen “Highly Overrated” and “dumb as a rock” and warned that “this dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

Springsteen performed at a star-studded rally for Harris in October, calling Trump an “American tyrant.”

The White House doubled down on the Springsteen insults in a statement: “When this loser Springsteen comes back home to his own City of Ruins in his head, he’ll realize his Glory Days are behind him and his fans have left him Out in the Street, putting him in a Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out because he has a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his brain,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung wrote in an email to The Washington Post on Friday afternoon. (Yes, those are references to well-known Springsteen songs.)

Less than an hour before his Springsteen post, Trump jabbed at Swift, another megastar with a history of criticizing him: “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’”

Trump raged against the pop singer on the same platform in September, days after Swift endorsed Harris for president.

The superstar announced after the first Trump-Harris presidential debate that she planned to vote for the vice president in an Instagram post signed “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”

In Swift’s statement, she cited a Trump endorsement falsely attributed to her as the reason she was being transparent about her voting plans: “It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” she wrote.

Swift previously compared Trump’s presidency to an “autocracy” and accused him of “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism.”