Bruce Springsteen fears Donald Trump hasn’t got the “mental competency” to lead America.
The Born in the U.S.A. hitmaker was an outspoken supporter of Trump’s former opponent Hillary Clinton, and when the 70-year-old property tycoon became the President-elect following a stunning victory at the polls in November (16), Springsteen was hit with an overwhelmingly negative feeling.
“I’ve felt disgust before, but never the kind of fear that you feel now,” he told WTF podcast host Marc Maron.
“It’s as simple as the fear of, is someone simply competent enough to do this particular job,” he continued. “Forget about where they are ideologically. Do they simply have the pure competence to be put in the position of such responsibility?”
While the 67-year-old doesn’t support Trump’s controversial ideology, he admits he understands why he won.
“(People have been) affected deeply by de-industrialisation and globalisation and the technological advances and you have been left behind, and someone comes along and says, ‘I’m gonna bring the jobs back’,” he added. “These are very powerful and simple ideas. They’re lies, they can’t occur. But if you’ve struggled for the past 30 or 40 years – and this has been the theme of much of my creative life for all those years – if someone comes along and offers you something else… it’s a compelling choice.”
But Bruce really fears that some of Trump’s controversial policy proposals, including instituting a registry for Muslims and deporting illegal immigrants, will be put in place when he takes office later this month (Jan16).
“When you let that genie out of the bottle – bigotry, racism, intolerance… – they don’t go back in the bottle that easily if they go back in at all,” he said. “Whether it’s a rise in hate crimes, people feeling they have license to speak and behave in ways that previously were considered un-American and are un-American. That’s what he’s appealing to.
“My fears are that those things find a place in ordinary, civil society.”