Bruce Springsteen says Donald Trump is a 'moron' with 'simple answers to very complex problems'

Republican nominee Donald Trump is a simplistic "moron," rock legend Bruce Springsteen said while speaking in an interview with Rolling Stone to promote his new autobiography.

"Well, you know, the republic is under siege by a moron, basically," he said in the conversation published Friday. "The whole thing is tragic. Without overstating it, it's a tragedy for our democracy." Springsteen went on to critique Trump's connection to "white nationalism and the alt-right movement" before offering a more empathetic analysis of why Trump's candidacy has garnered so much support:

"I believe that there's a price being paid for not addressing the real cost of the deindustrialization and globalization that has occurred in the United States for the past 35, 40 years and how it’s deeply affected people's lives and deeply hurt people to where they want someone who says they have a solution. And Trump's thing is simple answers to very complex problems. Fallacious answers to very complex problems. And that can be very appealing." [Springsteen, via Rolling Stone]

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.