Repeats on the television, repeats in real life. Playing now on the American politics channel is the old Springsteen/Trump bout. Over here, GB Spews is dusting off old episodes of It Ain’t Half Brexit Mum.
Trump-bashing from Springsteen? Oh, I can take as much as the Boss wishes to dish out. The Maga minions are not happy, though, tutting and muttering beneath their silly red caps.
That’s not to mention the reaction from Trump himself.
As Springsteen began the latest leg of his tour with the E Street Band, he took to the stage early in Manchester and made a speech saying the US was “currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration”.
He also referenced the “very weird, strange and dangerous shit” happening in America before condemning Trump for “persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent”.
To which Bruce might also have added that Trump was hollowing out the US state to his own advantage, destroying higher education and health care, all while apparently regarding the presidency as a giant cash machine.
Trump had an orange meltdown on his Truth Social platform where in the small hours he conducts myriad petty vendettas. He said Springsteen was “dumb as a rock” – quite something from a man who makes boulders look intellectual.
Trump also said Springsteen was a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker”.
His own skin could be as prune-like as anything and no one would be any wiser, thanks to that tangerine tan.
From horrid glimpse, while summoning TS Eliot’s line about “the skull beneath the skin”, the skin beneath the faux tan is emulsion white.
Music aside – and I do love a bit of Bruce – Springsteen looks to be in enviably good nick, whereas Trump suggests a shambling tower made of too many burgers.
How unseemly that Trump should be carrying on so when 80 is on the horizon. And take that from a man who can see 70 just over the next hill.
All power to Bruce. Sing that message out loud. Too few Americans have your platform or dare raise their voice.
And those voices need raising. At the time of typing, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has just moved to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enrol international students – ramping up his attempt to control/destroy the country’s top universities.
Now let’s change channels.
Whatever you think of Keir Starmer – and his ‘island of strangers’ remark was a new low – he does have a certain stubborn pragmatism and sticks at what he wants to achieve.
Starmer’s new EU deal is another bit of pragmatism. Nothing flashy, nothing remarkable. Just a sensible acknowledgement that we should have a stronger relationship with our nearest neighbours.
The political fallout was predictable. The Tories called the modest deal a Brexit ‘surrender’, Reform UK’s new MP Sarah Pochin said it was a ‘complete betrayal of Brexit’, while Boris Johnson, well, Boris Johnson blathered something interminably stupid. Much of the confected anger concerned the fishing deal – an exact copy of the one Johnson struck.
The new deal isn’t any sort of a betrayal. Brexit itself was a betrayal of good sense, and a monumentally pointless act of self-harm.
The members of that ranting chorus will never forgive or forget. Let’s leave them to their sour grumbles and get on with ordering life sensibly.
And the generator of grievance politics, the man who pursued Brexit so noisily and nastily, where was he when the deal was discussed in Parliament? Nigel Farage MP was on holiday in France. Nothing so piddling for him as taking part in a debate concerned what he has spent half his life banging on about.