I love Bruce Springsteen. I saw my first Springsteen concert in 1977. I'll never stop listening to “Born to Run” or the “Ghost of Tom Joad.”

But these days, I do so saddened that my hero has succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and has switched from righteously talking about small-p political issues, like poverty, vets, and injustice, to Politics as it exists on Sunday morning talk shows. The Boss has bought the MSM line that American democracy is to be talked about in the past tense.

Earlier this month, during a performance in Manchester, Springsteen reinforced his earlier remarks about President Donald Trump. “My home America, the America I've written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” said Springsteen. “Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American spirit to rise with us, raise your voices, and stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring.”

He worked similar comments into the same show later on, saying “There's some very weird, strange, and dangerous sh*t going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. They are removing residents off American streets without due process of law and deploying them to foreign detention centers as prisoners. That’s happening now. The majority of our elected representatives have utterly failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”

He finished the night's show with “Chimes of Freedom,” an old Bob Dylan tune which Springsteen poignantly played years ago in East Germany, in one of the first rock concerts permitted by the old Communist regime. Any serious Springsteen fan listening would get the message. For those who don't know the song, “Chimes of Freedom” uses the metaphor of chimes to represent enlightenment. The song depicts a shift from darkness to light, where the chimes signal the coming of a better future for those seeking liberty. If you’re Bruce Springsteen and you want to dis Trump, this is how you do it.

Trump of course fired back, calling Springsteen “highly overrated,” “dumb as a rock,” "a pushy, obnoxious jerk,” and a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)” on Truth Social. Trump promised to launch an investigation into whether Springsteen (and other celebrities like Oprah) accepted money as payback for their endorsement of Kamala Harris during the last presidential election. Springsteen was paid $75,000 for singing at a Harris rally, which may be ruled compensation for the endorsement. Springsteen previously campaigned for other Democratic candidates, to include Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.

To criticize Bruce is to mock God, but here goes. His professed affection for the working man, migrants, and the downtrodden, rings a bit hollow when you understand the man's net worth is over $1.2 billion. As Springsteen’s net worth has grown, his audience has transformed. Springsteen once found his people in middle America, but no longer. The left, since they figured out that “Born in the USA” is not exactly a patriotic anthem, has grown fond of Bruce, and his audience has increasingly become bicoastal, well-off, and urbane. His comments suggest he has forgotten those he writes about: the steelworker in Youngstown, the unemployed auto plant worker from Indiana, the highway cop in Nebraska. Such people are statistically likely to be Trump supporters, but they may no longer be able to afford the hundreds of dollars a concert ticket costs to keep Springsteen wealthy.

Bruce is happy to have taken their money, and now to tell them that they (roughly half the country) are wrong in their beliefs. He is willing to sell his old audience out over a single disputed immigration case involving a Turkish graduate student, a case he interprets as the death of free speech in America.

That is a real sign of TDS, exaggerating the significance of isolated cases and blowing up the fear over what might be happening next. As in Trump's first term, there is a constant cacophony of voices suggesting the next election will be canceled, or that it will be in reaction to the next court case that Trump denies the judiciary and creates the Constitutional crisis the left almost seems to be longing for as justification for their performative melodrama.

The other TDS sin Bruce commits is pretending everything Trump does, for example on illegal immigration and due process, is sui generis. Bruce is well-read, yet somehow reconciles his concerns over the number and type of deportations Trump is doing with the fact that his co-author and podcast buddy Barack Obama deported so many more, totaling more than 3 million people, 75 percent or more of whom did not see a judge to plead their case (Clinton and Bush also deported millions without judicial oversight.) Most of these deportations were “summary removals” carried out through long-standing legal procedures such as “expedited removal” and “reinstatement of removal,” which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge.

Ignoring the complexity of issues is another marker of TDS, and like the media, Bruce seems unaware immigration law works very differently from the felony criminal law version of due process he knows from Law & Order reruns. TDS does not respond well to complexity. No president before in U.S. history has been required to get “court permission” to defend his own borders. Maybe that is worth talking about onstage by someone a bit more articulate than Kid Rock.

On the subject of due process, Bruce must also be aware of the case of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his American son, both murdered via drone strikes ordered by his pal Barack Obama. That version of due process was a memo. Then-Attorney General Holder said of the al-Awlaki killing “that a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process’ and that the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against depriving a citizen of his or her life without due process of law does not mandate a ‘judicial process.’”

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It was unknown at the time, but Holder was referring to a secret white paper prepared by the Office of the Legal Counsel laying out the legal justification for the U.S. government to kill one of its own citizens extra-judicially, Orwellian legality not worth a protest song by the Boss. The kill paper, ahem, white paper drew heavily from Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which the U.S. imprisoned an American citizen from Afghanistan and sought to detain him indefinitely without trial as an enemy combatant, all without a peep out of Bruce.

With his guilt over getting out of service in Vietnam now made into a concert highlight soliloquy leading into an angry version of “Born in the USA,” Springsteen believes he remains a voice for veterans. Perhaps that’s true, albeit limited to the now politically safe territory of the Vietnam War. But not a word about multiple presidents, including his bud Obama, for the miscellaneous wars of recent history, including the launch into chaos of once-stable Libya and the creation of massive flows of refugees. You'd think 7,000 dead Americans and some 4 million dead Muslims might be fodder for lyricizing, more so than one Muslim academic sidelined from Columbia University.

I love Bruce Springsteen. I know all the words to all the songs from The River, and I play air drums along with "Badlands" when alone in the car. I single him out among all the TDS sufferers because he has singled himself out by remaining silent while our country slipped into dark places under earlier administrations, then adopting a Chicken Little stage pose only under Trump. Let us wish him well in his recovery someday from TDS so he can get back to making great music.