“Born in the USA” crooner, Bruce Springsteen, played to a packed out crowd in Melbourne, Austrailia Monday night where he opened by saying that he and his band were embarrassed to be Americans.
As The Blaze reports, the 67 year-old singer followed his band out on the stage and addressed his fans with a quip lobbed at President Trump.
“We stand before you embarrassed Americans tonight,” Springsteen told the audience as he introduced a ’60s pop tune by a group called the Orlons. “We’re gonna use this to send a letter back home.”
The song’s title? “Don’t Hang Up.”
The crowd got the joke pretty quickly, clearly a reference to Republican President Donald Trump’s self-described “tough” phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over the weekend regarding a “dumb” Obama administration agreement to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center.
Turnbull denied that the phone call ended harshly, telling a radio station that, “I want to make one observation about it. The report the president hung up is not correct, the call ended courteously.”
Click below for the footage:
Springsteen’s longtime guitarist tweeted an apology to Australia on behalf of America, saying:
In January, Springsteen told podcaster Marc Maron that he doesn’t think Trump is competent enough to be president.
“It’s simply the fear of, ‘Is someone simply competent enough to do this particular job?'” Springsteen told Maron. “Forget about where they are ideologically. Do they simply have the pure competence to be put in a position of such responsibility?”
Springsteen said he’d “felt disgust” over elections before, “but never, never the kind of fear that you feel now . . . So my fear is that those things find a place in ordinary, civil society, demeans the discussion and events of the day, and the country changes in a way that is unrecognizable, and we become estranged…Those are all dangerous things, and he hasn’t even taken office yet.”
In the clip below from their stop in Adelaide, Australia, Springsteen tells the crowd he’s not pleased with Trump’s immigration order. “Tonight we want to add our voices to the thousands of Americans who are protesting at airports around our country the Muslim Ban and the detention of foreign nationals and refugees,” Springsteen said. “America is a nation of immigrants, and we find this anti-democratic and fundamentally un-American.”