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Bruce Springsteen used Wednesday’s Nationals Park show to rip the Trump White House and announce an October Power to the People Festival before the midterms.
Bruce Springsteen spent Wednesday night yelling at the White House from about a mile and a half away. The 76-year-old singer and the E Street Band played the penultimate date of their Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour at Nationals Park in Washington, with a six-minute mid-show rant aimed at Donald Trump‘s administration.
The Washington Post set the scene. The paper’s on-the-ground review framing the tour as a political call to action and the DC stop as its loudest test yet notes that the show was always positioned as a political moment, with the venue choice and the tour’s anti-authoritarian thread driving the program.
Springsteen opened with the constitutional framing. “Now the E Street Band is here tonight in celebration and defense of the American ideals and values that have sustained our country for 250 years,” he told the crowd before launching into the set.
His critique of Trump landed without softening. “Our democracy, our constitution, our rule of law are being challenged right now as never before by a reckless, racist, incompetent, treasonous president,” Springsteen said.
USA Today caught the framing in full. The paper’s transcript of Springsteen’s call for hope over fear and the segue into The Temptations’ War reports that the singer asked the audience to choose “hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness,” before going straight into a cover of “War.”
The 27-song setlist also leaned political. The set included his recent “Streets of Minneapolis” and a crowd-led “ICE out!” chant, with Springsteen ad-libbing about the Iran war and the administration’s $1.8 billion IRS-related fund along the way.
The signature moment was the closing call. “Let them hear you at the f—ing White House,” Springsteen told a roaring crowd.
The festival announcement was the operational news. Springsteen revealed from the stage that he will headline the inaugural Power to the People Festival at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on October 3, exactly a month before the midterms.
The lineup is stacked. Yahoo’s festival-detail rundown listing the Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews Band, Joan Baez, and Serj Tankian among the confirmed acts reports that the event is being staged by Tom Morello and is billed as a “non-partisan celebration of peace, justice, solidarity, music, and community action.”
Other names on the bill include Dropkick Murphys and Jack Black. The Yahoo writeup notes that the festival website launched concurrent with the on-stage announcement and that additional acts will be revealed in the coming weeks.
The DC moment did not happen in a vacuum. Trump had publicly called for a boycott of Springsteen’s tour earlier this spring, using a Truth Social post to call the singer a “dried up prune” and a “boring singer.”
Springsteen had not been silent in response. Mediaite’s breakdown of the six-minute Trump-focused diatribe and the singer’s running tour-long political commentary tracks how the back-and-forth has become a fixture across the tour’s 20 dates, with multiple full-show political segments along the way.
The tour ends in Philadelphia on Saturday. The Power to the People Festival begins, by Springsteen’s own framing, where the tour leaves off.
The midterms are five months out. Springsteen’s voice, by his own promise, is not going quiet between now and then.
