A week after Donald Trump’s victory last November, I was in Winnipeg, Manitoba, for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s first ever concert in the city. I wondered if the Boss — who has a podcast with Barack Obama and vocally endorsed Kamala Harris’s campaign — would make any political statements. Beyond introducing “Long Walk Home” (a 2007 protest song about the effects of George W. Bush’s presidency on local communities) as a “prayer for my country,” mid-way through the twenty-seven-song set, no explicit political commentary was made.

Springsteen’s signature tune, “Born in the U.S.A.” (a scathing indictment of the treatment of Vietnam vets, often lost amid the fist-pumping flag-waving military beat) was not played once on his band’s eight-date Canadian tour. Fast-forward five months, and Springsteen reclaimed his most misunderstood hit to kick off encores for the three dates in Manchester, England, which were the opening nights for the Land of Hope and Dreams European tour. Running for sixteen dates (including four concerts rescheduled from last year after Springsteen was forced to postpone on medical orders), the tour wraps up with the second of two sold-out dates at San Siro Soccer Stadium in Milan on July 3.

As Will Hodgkinson wrote in his review for The Times, “By the law of averages Springsteen must have bad nights, but they are hard to find.” I’ve yet to see one, although my tally of nine Springsteen gigs over the years pales in comparison to the superfans who travel the world to see their hero in the flesh.

The Boss fronting the E Street band through marathon concerts on arena and stadium stages is simultaneously dependable and filled with surprises, playing around with set lists and curfews. But the surprises come no greater than opening night in Manchester: Springsteen followed his seventeen musicians onstage to launch into a tirade against a “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration” before imploring all “who believe in democracy and the best of the American experience” to raise their voices, rise out of their seats, and join the mighty E Street Band in a communal celebration and defense of the righteousness of art. Welcome to the land of hope and dreams!

There was more explicit political critique and dramatic frisson in this opening three minutes than in an entire matinee performance of Hamlet Hail to the Thief  — a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Radiohead drawing on the Oxford band’s anti-Bush 2003 concept album — that I’d seen earlier the same day at Manchester’s Aviva Studios. The gloves were off, the Boss kicking off the most political concert of his career with the most explicit condemnation of the Trump administration yet by a major rock star — and delivered in more precise fashion than Robert De Niro’s recent lambasting of Trump as a philistine in Cannes.

Springsteen is more concerned about what he referred to as the “sadistic pleasure” being inflicted “on loyal American workers” by the privileged few. This was no off-the-cuff tirade and, standing close to the stage, I could see Springsteen had the speech written out on his teleprompter although he had memorized the knockout punch lines. There isn’t much space for ad-libbing when translations have been prepared to project on to video screens as the band treks around Europe. Still, Springsteen was gauging the audiences, and communicated to his band last minute to insert the feel-good fan favorite “My Love Will Not Let You Down” before the debut concert performance of “Rainmaker,” a song from the underwhelming 2020 studio album Letter to You about a con man — in Manchester dedicated to “our dear leader.”

Springsteen was back on the attack again in his preface to “My City of Ruins” (a gospel-tinged lament for his hometown of Asbury Park), quoting James Baldwin: “In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough,” before evoking everyday citizens as the ultimate line of defense against tyranny. The twenty-seven-song set ended with a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” (a mainstay of Springsteen’s sets for the 1988 Amnesty International Human Rights Now! tour). Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (which he played with Pete Seeger at Obama’s inauguration) was aired over the PA as the 20,000-plus attendees exited the arena. These were the only two songs of the evening whose lyrics were unfamiliar to large swathes of the British audience.

In the twenty-first century, Springsteen is a much bigger live draw in Europe than back home. Manchester was a big deal for locals and fans because it was the first time in years that the E Street Band had played indoors this side of the Atlantic. While the recently opened Co-Op Live arena — which Springsteen complimented as among the best venues he had ever played — is hardly intimate, attending the three Manchester shows often felt like being a privileged spectator at a dress-rehearsal for his run of European stadium shows.

The only complaints on May 14 related to acoustics (much improved on nights two and three) not ideology. British critics from across the political spectrum gave rave reviews to the Manchester concerts, although the Daily Telegraph’s Neil McCormick did question whether Springsteen’s speeches might have had more “biting impact” back home. The impact has been played out digitally on social media and through a live EP recorded on the first night in Manchester — featuring the speeches, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Long Walk Home,” “My City of Ruins,” and “Chimes of Freedom” — being given a digital release. Fast approaching his seventy-sixth birthday, and with no concerts scheduled beyond San Siro Stadium on July 3, the bets are off as to whether he and the E Street Band have another US tour left in them.

Trump wasted little time in retaliating to Springsteen’s attack, first with a playground taunt — dismissing the rocker as a “dried-out prune” — before, more sinisterly, calling for an investigation into celebrity supporters of Harris and posting a video that spliced a clip of the president hitting a drive at a golf event with the Boss slipping on stage at a 2023 concert in Amsterdam.

Kid Rock — one of Trump’s relatively few supporters from the music world — accused Springsteen of cozying up to Hollywood elites, feigning working-class credentials and being a punk for making the statement in Europe. Two decades ago, the Dixie Chicks were similarly chided for criticizing George W. Bush in London rather than back home. Bruce’s father worked for much of his life in a factory, and his own son is a firefighter, but in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run, he is candid about feelings of guilt surrounding embodying the working-class experience when he has never clocked in in his life.

His words in Manchester made clear that he was rabid at the Trump administration for its treatment of the protagonists of his songs rather than its direct effects on him or even his audience. In truth, after Springsteen and long-term manager Jon Landau controversially introduced dynamic pricing to optimize revenue from tours post-COVID, blue-collar workers are increasingly an endangered species at E Street Band gigs.

Ticket pricing aside, the Boss is that rare beast: a rock superstar who becomes more radical with age. Born in the U.S.A. is the best-selling protest album of all time, but it wouldn’t have become so if the rocker and his team hadn’t been on board with the ambiguity of the all-American iconography surrounding its promotion. Springsteen admits that the combination of fame and politics provoked ambivalent feelings at the height of his superstardom.

Writing about Ronald Reagan’s appropriation of “Born in the U.S.A.” for his election campaign in his autobiography, Springsteen recalls: “His attention elicited from me two responses. The first was. . . ‘Fucker!’ The second was, ‘The president said my name!’ Or maybe it was the other way around.”

On reconvening the E Street Band after a long sabbatical in the late 1990s, his fame had plateaued, but he had gained in moral stature, unafraid of shaking his audiences out of complacency. “American Skin (41 Shots),” about four New York Police Department cops shooting an unarmed (and innocent) African immigrant suspect — and the first Springsteen song to document a current news story — was performed as the centerpiece of a run of shows at Madison Square Garden for which the police union instructed members to not work security.

The hollers of “Bruuuuce” can sound like booing to the untrained ear and make it harder to spot any signs of dissent. From what I could tell, there were no voices of disapproval at the opening night in Manchester and a collective euphoria took over the arena on the third and final night — or “round three” as Springsteen described it — when he doubled down by adding the 1984 classic “No Surrender” as a defiant set-opener.

The shock value was lost after opening night, and on May 20, quite a few people — myself included — went for a pit stop at the toilet or bar during “Rainmaker.” I did think I discerned a couple of lone boos during later speeches (pro-Trump supporters in Lancashire, maybe?); after Bruce thanked us for indulging him in the buildup to “My City of Ruins,” a man near me did shout out for him to get on with it and play a song. This was a bit unfair: the social media furor can give the misguided impression that Springsteen’s politicized concerts were joyless affairs, and the hectoring captured on the live Manchester EP only represented a small portion of the show.

An unpopular opinion perhaps, but for me the only politically motivated musical misstep of the Manchester concerts was to perform “Born in the U.S.A.” on each and every night. Referring to himself as an ambassador for his country, auditing its successes and shortcomings, Springsteen clearly wanted to reclaim the iconic hit for dangerous times, but there is a reason why, in recent tours, he has only played it occasionally: it is among the most vocally demanding of his songs, and he can no longer deliver it like he once did.

That said, his farewell to Manchester with a home run of classics — “The Rising,” “Badlands,” “Thunder Road,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Born to Run,” “Glory Days,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” — was life-affirming.

If sixty-thousand-plus people raised themselves out of their seats to sing at the top of their voices over three nights, it had less to do with defending democracy than the fact that Springsteen has one of the finest back catalogues in popular music. And neither he nor his band has any desire to go gentle into that good night. The triple-guitar attack by Springsteen, Nils Lofgren, and Steven Van Zandt on deep-cut “Murder Incorporated” was as viscerally exhilarating as Metallica at the peak of their powers.

Sustained intensity, as much as his willingness to express what most major cultural figures fear to say in public, is what renders the Boss as perhaps the world’s most influential protest singer, a formidable enemy for the president of the USA.