White House turns its fire on the Boss

While the White House promotional machine goes in hard behind Amazon’s $75m Melania hagiography – “Get your tickets today – Selling out, FAST!,” the president has posted on Truth Social, despite said tickets selling very much like cold cakes – the latest release from one of America’s true bona fide superstars has gone down less well.

Bruce Springsteen has just raced to the top of the iTunes Top Songs chart, the platform’s ranking of the bestselling individual tracks in the US, with Streets of Minneapolis, a response to “the state terror being visited on the city” and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by Trump’s trigger-happy ICE goons.

The song’s lyrics record how “a city aflame fought fire and ice ’neath an occupier’s boots”, a force the Boss describes as “King Trump’s private army from the DHS”. At one point Springsteen honours the victims by name, singing: “There were bloody footprints / Where mercy should have stood / And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets / Alex Pretti and Renee Good.”

Now, though, the White House has rowed in to dismiss it, with Abigail Jackson, deputy press secretary and Karoline Leavitt mini-me, issuing a press statement labelling it as “irrelevant”.

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“The Trump administration is focused on encouraging state and local Democrats to work with federal law enforcement officers on removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from their communities – not random songs with irrelevant opinions and inaccurate information,” Jackson said in an unusually lengthy statement to dismiss something as irrelevant.

“The media should cover how Democrats have refused to work with the administration, and instead, opted to provide sanctuary for these criminal illegals.”

Firstly, that probably wouldn’t have made for such a heartstring-pulling ditty. And secondly, it’s difficult to know what she deems is “inaccurate information” when the fact that Pretty and Good were shot dead on the spot by members of Trump’s MAGA militia is a matter of record, caught by countless cameras.

Or perhaps Donald Trump listened to it himself and misread the message? This is a president, after all, whose favourite song is the Village People’s YMCA – a song he appears to believe really is just extolling the virtues of the Young Men’s Christian Association.