Different President, Same Song: Trump Pulls a Nixon in His Battle Against The Boss
Before Donald Trump took to Truth Social to rage against Bruce Springsteen — calling him a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker” and threatening ominously that “we’ll all see how it goes for him” — another American president once tried to silence a politically outspoken rock star.
But Richard Nixon didn’t just tweet insults at John Lennon. He tried to deport him.
That 1970s-era culture war — now resurrected in a new doc, One to One: John & Yoko — echoes eerily in Trump’s latest feud with American music royalty. Lennon, a British citizen with a U.S. green card living in New York at the time, had aligned himself with the radical left and spoken out forcefully against the Vietnam War and Nixon’s re-election. The Nixon administration responded by weaponizing immigration law, trying to boot Lennon back to the UK over an old pot bust. It was a thin pretext, and everyone knew it.
FBI files were opened. Surveillance began. Lennon became a target. The former Beatle hit back the only way he knew how, through his music. “I’ve had enough of reading things by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians,” he sang in “Gimme Some Truth,” the song that opens the second side of 1971’s Imagine. “No short-haired, yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dick is going to Mother Hubbard soft soap me.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/different-president-same-song-trump-204754665.html