Veteran rock star Bruce Springsteen, a high-profile critic of President Donald Trump, slammed the U.S. administration as “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” during a concert Wednesday in Berlin.
He was addressing tens of thousands of fans at a stadium built for the 1936 Olympic Games that still bears the scars of World War II and contains relics from the country’s dark Nazi past.
“Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism, and let freedom reign,” he said.
Springsteen, long a political opponent of the president, has made increasingly pointed and contentious public statements in recent concerts.
He denounced Trump's politics during a concert last month in Manchester, calling him an “unfit president” leading a “rogue government” of people who have “no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.”
Springsteen is no stranger to Berlin. In July 1988, he became one of the first Western musicians to perform in East Germany, performing to a ravenous crowd of 160,000 East Germans yearning for American rock ’n’ roll and the freedom it represented to the youth living under the crumbling communist regime.
An Associated Press news story from that period says “fireworks steaked through the sky” and hundreds of people in the audience waved handmade American flags as they sang along to “Born in the USA.”
Almost four decades later, Springsteen issued a stark warning: “The America that I love, the America that I’ve sung to you about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration."
