The election of Donald Trump to POTUS has let the genie of "racism, bigotry, intolerance" out of the bottle, says rocker Bruce Springsteen, and there's no putting it back.
Speaking on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Springsteen began by saying his greatest fear in a Trump presidency would be whether or not he was "competent enough to do this particular job."
"Forget about where they are ideologically," he said. "Do they simply have the pure competence to be put in a position of such responsibility?"
Though Springsteen understands the reason why Trump got elected and the pain felt by working-class Americans, he lamented that "racism, bigotry, intolerance" has been let "out of the bottle."
When you let that genie out of the bottle — racism, bigotry, intolerance — when you let those things out of the bottle, they don’t go back in the bottle that easily, if they go back in at all. Whether it’s a rise in hate crimes, people feeling that 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.
And so my fear is that those things find a place in ordinary, civil society, demeans the discussion and events of the day, and the country changes in a way that is unrecognizable, and we become estranged… Those are all dangerous things, and he hasn’t even taken office yet. So we gotta wait and see. But those are certainly the implications, and you also look at who he’s been picking for his Cabinet, that doesn’t speak very well for what’s coming up.
Springsteen did, however, show some grace for Trump's supporters and even said people should get out and start talking to them.
"So the answer is not to pull back into your little box, the answer is, ‘Let’s find out,'" he told Maron. "There’s plenty of good, solid folks that voted for Donald Trump, as well as people who had other agendas. But to know that, you’ve got to know some."
Obama awarded Springsteen the "Medal of Freedom" in November 2016 for supposedly capturing "the pain and the promise of the American experience" through his legacy of music.
