Tom Morello has never been one to mince words when it comes to his thoughts on Donald Trump. The firebrand Rage Against the Machine guitarist and solo star joined his friend and fellow rock agitator Bruce Springsteen over the weekend in giving a NSFW salute No. 27 from the stage.
Performing at the Boston Calling 2025 music festival on Sunday (May 25), Morello took the stage in front of a towering backdrop that featured a series of images of the president amid a sea of oversized buttons that spelled out “F–K TRUMP.” If that message wasn’t clear enough, at one point during his set, Morello flipped his instrument up to play with his teeth and revealed another pointed message aimed at the current administration taped to the back of his guitar that read “F–k I.C.E.,” in seeming reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency charged with implementing Trump’s aggressive deportation policy.
Introducing a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Morello dedicated the track to The Boss, noting that the rocker has been “in a tussle with the president lately” after the Jersey giant recently dubbed the current administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous,” a broadside that raised the ire of the commander in chief.
“Bruce is going after Trump because Bruce, his whole life, he’s been about truth, justice, democracy, equality,” Morello said. “And Trump is mad at him because Bruce draws a much bigger audience. F–k that guy.” According to Boston.com, at the top of his set, Morello invited fans to enjoy “the last big event before they throw us in jail.”
In the midst of the Trump administration’s attack on universities it claims are not doing enough to combat antisemitism, Morello also mentioned his alma mater, Harvard University, which has particularly drawn Trump’s ire. In its latest actions, the administration has threatened to strip the school of more than $3 billion in grants following Trump’s order to freeze more than $2.2 billion in federal funding grants for the university and threats to revoke its tax-exempt status. Morello praised Harvard’s recent decision to offer a free online course called “We the People: Civic Engagement in a Constitutional Democracy.”
Morello, who graduated with honors from Harvard in 1986 with a B.A. in political science, described the class as a primer on “basic U.S. government, understanding the Constitution, and how to recognize a dictatorship takeover of your country.”
The lash out against Trump by Morello amid the president’s slash-and-burn reshaping of democratic norms came after Springsteen kicked off his Land of Hope and Dreams tour in Manchester, England on May 14 by lambasting the blitz of strong-arm actions that many political pundits have deemed authoritarian.
“In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, and has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” Springsteen told the crowd. “Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”
As is his wont, Trump replied to Springsteen’s harsh words with one of his all-caps Truth Social disses, calling the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer “highly overrated” and “dumb as a rock.” The president continued, “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country.”
On the precipice of what many financial experts say could be a ruinous global recession sparked by Trump’s unpredictable, see-saw tariffs, the president continued his attacks on Springsteen over the ensuing days, adding in another of his favorite targets: Taylor Swift. On May 16, the 78-year-old leader of the free world wrote, “Has anyone noticed that, since i said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?‘”
While Swift has not responded to the unprovoked attack to date, Springsteen was unbowed, doubling down on his disdain for Trump on May 17, telling a crowd in Manchester, “Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore… In my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. That’s happening now… In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. That’s happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers,” calling Trump an “unfit president” who is running a “rogue government.”
