Bruce Springsteen opened his 2026 tour in Minneapolis calling out Pam Bondi, Trump, and ‘the richest men in America’ — and he’s just getting started.
If you thought Bruce Springsteen was going to open his 2026 “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour with some feel-good nostalgia and leave politics at the door — you clearly haven’t been paying attention.
Opening night in Minneapolis, the Boss walked onstage with the E Street Band and kicked things off with Edwin Starr’s 1970 protest anthem “War.” That alone told you everything about where this night was headed.
Here’s the thing — Minneapolis isn’t a random tour stop. This city is a wound right now. Local residents Renée Nicole Macklin Good and Alex Pretty were shot and killed by ICE agents during protests. Springsteen already wrote a song about it — “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he dropped on January 28th and first performed live at the First Avenue club on January 30th at a “Defend Minnesota” benefit concert alongside Tom Morello, who’s now riding with him as a guest guitarist on this entire tour.
He came back to the city just three days before the tour opener to perform the song again at a massive “No Kings” rally in St. Paul.
So yeah. Minneapolis was a very deliberate choice. This wasn’t coincidence. This was a statement.
Once the livestream of the first two songs cut off mid-show, Springsteen unleashed a full speech — and this one hit different. He called out Attorney General Pam Bondi by name, saying on stage that she “takes her marching orders straight from a corrupt White House,” prosecutes the president’s enemies, covers up for his actions, and shields his allies.
He said the richest men in America — no names dropped, but you knew exactly who he meant — gutted U.S. foreign aid and abandoned the world’s most vulnerable people.
He called out NATO abandonment, museum censorship on slavery history, and said point-blank: “We have a president who can’t handle the truth.”
He kept hitting it with “This is happening now” after every single point. Over and over. Like a drumbeat.
And then he went here — he said America is no longer seen globally as an imperfect-but-strong defender of democracy. He said the world now looks at the U.S. as, and these are his words, “the reckless, unpredictable, predatory rogue nation.”
That’s not rally talk. That’s a man using a concert stage as a podium for the next two months straight.
Before the tour, Springsteen told the Minneapolis Star-News he’s fully ready for the right-wing blowback. “I do what I want to do, I say what I want to say,” he told the paper. He also told them he hasn’t seen the country this on edge since 1968, when he was 18 years old.
This tour wraps just after Memorial Day Weekend — in Washington, D.C. Think about that for a second.
Springsteen calling out Pam Bondi and the “richest men in America” by name and implication from a concert stage is kind of a big deal — this isn’t a vague “love thy neighbor” speech. This is personal. He’s been building to this since at least May 2025 when he opened an overseas tour in Manchester calling Trump’s administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous.Trump
shot back calling him “highly overrated” and “a pushy, obnoxious JERK.” So these two are clearly not done with each other.
And with a D.C. finale locked in — right around Memorial Day — this whole tour feels less like a concert run and more like a two-month political run disguised as a concert tour.
The real question isn’t whether Springsteen will keep escalating. He absolutely will. The question is — what does it look like when he hits that D.C. stage?
