Trump is ‘deeply damaged to his core’, says Bruce Springsteen

The Boss isn’t holding back when it comes to President Trump’s actions and words. Bruce Springsteen, in a no-holds-barred interview with Esquire magazine, called the US president “deeply damaged to his core” and blamed Trump for dividing the country.

“[He] has no interest in uniting the country and actually has an interest in doing the opposite and dividing us, which he does on an almost daily basis. That’s simply a crime against humanity, as far as I’m concerned,” the 69-year-old rocker said in the article, published on Tuesday.

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“It’s an awful, awful message to send out into the world. You are intentionally trying to disenfranchise a large portion of Americans. That’s unforgivable.”

Springsteen, who usually lets his music do the talking, has been an outspoken critic of the president’s immigration policies. During a June performance of his Broadway show Springsteen on Broadway” he deviated from the set he’d previously performed nearly 150 times to play The Ghost of Tom Joad in protest at the president’s hard line on refugees at the US border with Mexico.

In his interview with Esquire, Springsteen said the message of community and citizenship in his 1980 song The Ties That Bind is especially relevant today. “Look at Trump,” Springsteen said. “He has forsaken a lot of these things and it’s affected him. He’s deeply damaged to his core.”

According to the New Jersey native, this is “a scary moment for any conscientious American”.

On the bright side, Springsteen doesn’t think that Trump is the end of the American dream.

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However, he doesn’t see a saviour on the horizon. “I do believe we’ll survive Trump. But I don’t know if I see a unifying figure on the horizon,” he said.

“That worries me. Because the partisanship and the country being split down the middle is something that’s gravely dangerous. Let people view themselves as Americans first. Let people give each other a chance.”