Rob PegoraroProtest songs at Nationals Park
It’s been less than 14 years since I last saw Bruce Springsteen play a concert at Nationals Park, but it feels like decades have passed since those innocent days of 2012. The nation and the world have changed in unpleasant and unsettling ways, those years have left their wear on me… and somehow the Boss barely seems to have aged.
Springsteen’s music, however, resonated in new ways Wednesday night against the backdrop of the second Trump administration’s cruelty, corruption and crime–and Springsteen’s up-to-the-minute denunciations of it, including commentary on this week’s abuses of power at ICE’s Delaney Hall prison outside Newark.
So “No Surrender,” released in 1984 on an album I got on tape, sounded very much of 2026’s moment in this setting. As Springsteen said towards the end of the night: “No one is coming to save us. So we have to do it ourselves.”
Likewise, the angry words in “The Promised Land” about being lied to (about what exactly is left to the listener’s imagination) hit in a way they hadn’t before when Springsteen and the E Street Band lit into that 1978 release right after “Streets of Minneapolis”–the song he wrote in January after government agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti on those frozen streets.
That reminder of the crimes committed by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security then made “American Skin (41 Shots)” more arresting than before. People in the Twin Cities probably have some words about how in Trump 2.0’s thuggish version of the United States, you can get killed just for living in your American skin.
A cover of the Clash’s “Clampdown” on which Springsteen and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello took turns on vocals itself picked up a little new relevance when heard in a neighborhood that has picked up a reputation, maybe undeserved, as a Republican hangout. As Mick Jones and Joe Strummer wrote in the late 1970s: “No man born with a living soul / can be working for the clampdown.”
Hearing “Youngstown” later in the set, I had to think the protagonist would have voted for Trump three times in a row. Would that embittered man be rethinking those choices now that Trump’s promises to renew industrial America have proved as empty as his pledges to most people besides January 6 insurrectionists? Or would he still be looking for somebody to blame?
When many other boldface names in American society keep pretending that this administration is just another presidency, Springsteen is calling out Trump’s regime with the vocabulary it deserves. That is called honesty, and it’s only one of the reasons why his work keeps speaking to me more than four decades after I started listening to it.
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