Early Monday morning, when much of the White House press corps was fast asleep, President Donald Trump demanded the federal government conduct a “major investigation” into singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, a Trump critic, and his presidential endorsement last year.
On Friday, the sitting American president had already warned Springsteen that he “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT,” and “we’ll all see how it goes for him” once the rock star is back home in the United States. Springsteen failed to comply, and spoke out once again about the “unfit” president at a concert in Manchester, England, on Saturday. “Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore,” he said.
Those comments led to a new wave of baseless threats from Trump against Springsteen and two more prominent celebrities who endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, Beyoncé and Oprah Winfrey.
There are numerous scandals, authoritarian power grabs, and moral abominations being carried out by the second Trump administration, largely in plain sight. The twice-impeached, repeatedly indicted president thrives on attention, so it may feel easy to dismiss Trump’s latest celeb-obsessed outburst as a mere temper tantrum or even a distraction.
That would be a mistake. Trump’s crusade against the First Amendment and free expression dates back to at least his first four years in the White House, and his 2016 presidential campaign. And Trump’s recurring threat against “The Boss” is yet another front in his second administration’s larger scorched-earth campaign against free speech and democratic values in this country.
“Accountability for a class of people who act as if they’re above the law may be uncomfortable for Rolling Stone, but it’s refreshing to the American people,” says Trump White House spokesperson Harrison Fields. He adds that the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission have jurisdiction over these supposed matters, and that “each entity will act independently in its decision-making.” (The FEC declined to comment on this story; the DOJ did not immediately respond.)
According to three sources familiar with the matter, Trump has repeatedly vented to close associates, both before and after his 2024 election victory, about using the Justice Department, Federal Communications Commission, FEC, and other government organs to crack down on (in his incorrect characterization) the “illegal” campaign finance violations made by Democratic-aligned celebrities, including late-night talk show hosts, and other liberals.
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“HOW MUCH DID KAMALA HARRIS PAY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN FOR HIS POOR PERFORMANCE DURING HER CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT? WHY DID HE ACCEPT THAT MONEY IF HE IS SUCH A FAN OF HERS? ISN’T THAT A MAJOR AND ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION? WHAT ABOUT BEYONCÉ? …AND HOW MUCH WENT TO OPRAH, AND BONO??? I am going to call for a major investigation into this matter,” the president posted to his social media website on Monday. “Candidates aren’t allowed to pay for ENDORSEMENTS, which is what Kamala did, under the guise of paying for entertainment … IT’S NOT LEGAL! For these unpatriotic ‘entertainers,’ this was just a CORRUPT & UNLAWFUL way to capitalize on a broken system. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!”
Trump’s legal theory here is wrong — he effectively has the situation backwards.
Harris did not pay Beyoncé, Winfrey, or Springsteen for their endorsements. The candidate, in reality, made payments to their production companies for services rendered, as is legally required.
Harris’ campaign reported paying $1 million to Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Productions, to stage and staff their livestreamed town hall in Detroit. The Harris campaign paid $165,000 in November to Beyoncé’s production company, Parkwood Production Media, after she appeared at a Harris rally in Houston. The campaign paid $76,000 to Springsteen’s production company, Thrill Hill Productions, after he performed at a Harris rally in Georgia in October.
Campaign finance laws require campaigns to pay fair-market value to vendors. If she failed to pay any of these companies for performing services at an event or rally, it would constitute an illegal in-kind contribution to the campaign in two ways: The contribution would exceed donation limits, and companies are not permitted to donate directly to candidates.
And yet, there are right-wing attorneys and political advisers who’ve entertained, or egged on, these impulses of Trump’s in recent months. Some of these lawyers and operatives, the sources add, now work in Trump’s government.
The president also apparently believes that a late-night comedian telling a mean joke about him might constitute an illegal in-kind political contribution to his opponents.
During his first administration, he tried to get his Department of Justice to punish Saturday Night Live and other TV shows, and he separately instructed his White House staff to pressure Disney to censor ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
When Trump would do those things during his first term in office, some of his key officials would roll their eyes and laugh it off, then wait for him to move on or forget about it. Today, President Trump is surrounded by senior personnel whose primary job qualification is that they will dutifully explore and execute on his most fascistic, corrupt, and nonsensical demands.
One reason that Trump continues to be fixated on weaponizing campaign finance laws against his political and cultural enemies, such as the “Thunder Road” songwriter, is rather simple: revenge.
According to those who’ve spoken to Trump in recent months about this, the president still hasn’t gotten over the fact that he was implicated — first by federal prosecutors in 2018, then by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in 2023 — as the ringleader in a conspiracy to break campaign finance laws and deliver hush-money payments to women, including most famously adult film star Stormy Daniels. Bragg indicted Trump, and the trial last year resulted in him becoming the first convicted-felon American president.
Within the past several months, the president has privately grumbled that if prosecutors could use the (as he’s at times called it) “bullshit” campaign-finance-related claim against him, there is no reason it shouldn’t be applied to certain famous entertainers, TV and news personalities, Democratic figures, and other targets, two sources who’ve spoken to Trump about this matter say.
“Democrats pretended to care about campaign finance violations when they persecuted President Trump with their lawfare,” Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer close to Trump who is a key player of the MAGA legal elite, tells Rolling Stone. “Maybe they shouldn’t have thrown stones in glass houses. Nobody is above the law.”
It would be much easier to shrug off Trump’s menacing of Springsteen if only Trump’s new administration hadn’t already demonstrated a gleeful willingness to throw people in jail only because they voiced an opinion or wrote an op-ed. And it was just last month that this president gathered the media and TV cameras so they could watch him sign an executive order in the Oval Office ordering the Justice Department to criminally investigate Chris Krebs, a former Trump cybersecurity official whose only sin was he publicly stated the truth that the 2020 election was not in fact rigged against Trump.
As Team Trump knows full well, it is almost beside the point whether or not the Trump administration ever launches a formal investigation of Springsteen or his absolutely legal endorsement of then-Vice President Harris. The threat of smashing the full weight of the federal government on The Boss, because he exercised his right to free speech, is a repressive action in itself — one that would not be disregarded or excused were it done by virtually any other U.S. leader in recent history.
In a sense, this is all expected, even if it is all objectively scandalous and abusive. During his 2024 reelection bid, Trump vowed to the voters that he would exact “retribution” from the Oval Office, and that his enemies, real and imagined, would suffer, either because they tried to hold him accountable for his various alleged crimes or because they pissed him off.
At times, Trump tried to vaguely downplay his explicit promises, and defaulted to a talking point that policy and economic “success” would be his retribution. His attempt at campaign-trail public relations may have given some of his associates false hope.
In early January, prior to Trump’s second inauguration in Washington, D.C., celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz spoke at a screening, hosted at Trump’s private Florida club and estate of Mar-a-Lago, of a documentary about John Eastman, an attorney who aided Trump’s efforts to cling to power and overturn the 2020 election results. (Dershowitz is featured in the film.)
Dershowitz, a self-described liberal Democrat who was part of Trump’s defense team during his first impeachment, tells Rolling Stone that as he delivered his remarks at the event, he noticed the then-president-elect sitting in the audience. At that moment, he decided to address Trump directly, to issue a modest plea of sorts.
“I said I was opposed to any kind of weaponization of the legal system… and I was hoping the new administration would end any kind of lawfare,” Dershowitz recalls. “The proper response to what happened to you, I said, was not to do it to Democrats, it is to not do it to anybody … Both parties should eschew weaponization.”
At that point, the lawyer says, Trump “seemed to nod in agreement.”
It’s safe to say the 45th and 47th president of the United States did not, in fact, agree.
From Rolling Stone US
