Earlier than Donald Trump took to Fact Social to rage towards Bruce Springsteen — calling him a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker” and threatening ominously that “we’ll all see the way it goes for him” — one other American president as soon as tried to silence a politically outspoken rock star.
However Richard Nixon didn’t simply tweet insults at John Lennon. He tried to deport him.
That Seventies-era tradition warfare — now resurrected in a brand new doc, One to One: John & Yoko — echoes eerily in Trump’s newest feud with American music royalty. Lennon, a British citizen with a U.S. inexperienced card dwelling in New York on the time, had aligned himself with the novel left and spoken out forcefully towards the Vietnam Warfare and Nixon’s re-election. The Nixon administration responded by weaponizing immigration legislation, making an attempt as well Lennon again to the UK over an previous pot bust. It was a skinny pretext, and everybody knew it.
FBI recordsdata have been opened. Surveillance started. Lennon turned a goal. The previous Beatle hit again the one manner he knew how, by way of his music. “I’ve had sufficient of studying issues by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians,” he sang in “Gimme Some Fact,” the track that opens the second aspect of 1971’s Think about. “No short-haired, yellow-bellied son of Tough Dick goes to Mom Hubbard gentle cleaning soap me.”
Lastly, in 1975, after years of authorized battles, a federal courtroom shut down the case, calling it “selective deportation based mostly on secret political grounds.” However the injury had already been finished: Lennon’s activism had been successfully neutered. And 5 years later, at simply 40, Lennon was gunned down by a deranged fan exterior his dwelling on New York’s higher west aspect.
Practically fifty years later, Trump isn’t going after foreign-born singers — a minimum of not but — however his public assaults on home critics like Springsteen, Beyoncé and Oprah Winfrey carry a well-recognized whiff of authoritarian payback. The most recent dust-up started Might 14, when Springsteen, performing in Manchester, England, informed the gang:
“The America I like… is at the moment within the palms of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”
“There’s some very bizarre, unusual and harmful shit occurring on the market,” the Boss went on. “In America, the richest males are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest kids to illness and loss of life.”
Inside 48 hours, Trump fired again on-line, unloading on Springsteen’s music, his appears, his politics, his intelligence (“Dumb as a rock”) — and issuing a imprecise however chilling warning about “the way it goes for him” as soon as he returns to the U.S.
Quickly after, Trump expanded the assault, accusing Springsteen, Beyoncé, Oprah, and Bono of accepting unlawful marketing campaign funds from Kamala Harris. “CANDIDATES AREN’T ALLOWED TO PAY FOR ENDORSEMENTS,” he screamed in all caps. “IT’S NOT LEGAL!”
There’s, in fact, no proof of wrongdoing. In response to Rolling Stone, Harris paid for providers — city halls, rallies, performances — by way of the artists’ manufacturing corporations, as required by marketing campaign legislation. However information by no means slowed Nixon, both.
Again within the early Seventies, Lennon’s title didn’t seem on Nixon’s notorious “Enemies Listing,” which included such liberal luminaries as Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck and Barbra Streisand. However he was handled like one. Trump, it appears, is reviving that playbook — solely this time, he’s skipping the key memos and going straight for the digital bullhorn.
Trump, who has famously poor style in music (he thinks Child Rock is the following Frank Sinatra), is now
treating a few of the nation’s biggest performers like enemies of the state. What comes subsequent for them — Subpoenas? Canceled visas? IRS audits? — is anybody’s guess.