Readers may recall that in the waning weeks of last year’s American presidential campaign race, several megastar performers added their voices to the chorus of resistance to the looming prospect of another Donald Trump presidency. Beyonce and Taylor Swift were among these luminaries.

We saw how much difference that made in the actual election. Now, after a relatively long hiatus, the dialectic between cultural icons and the peerless demagogue president has emerged from hibernation and rocks again.

The best recent example is Bruce Springsteen. The iconic New Jersey-rooted rock star offered some notable sentiments in Manchester, England recently as he kicked off a big new international tour. According to press reports including by the BBC, “the Boss” took the occasion of the opening night of his new Land of Hope and Dreams Tour to inveigh against the Trump administration in three separate statements. Here’s some of what he said:

Springsteen called the Trump administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous”. He said “the union of people around a common set of values is all that stands between democracy and authoritarianism”. And Springsteen called Trump an “unfit president”, criticising what he described as “very weird, strange and dangerous stuff going on” in the United States.

“They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands,” Springsteen said. “They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centres and prisons. This is all happening now.”

No one paying attention expected Trump not to respond. “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy,” Trump huffed. “Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last Friday.

Trump also called Springsteen “highly overrated” and “dumb as a rock” and warned about “this dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)”.

The White House then reinforced Trump’s insults in a statement: “When this loser Springsteen comes back home to his own City of Ruins in his head, he’ll realise his Glory Days are behind him and his fans have left him Out in the Street, putting him in a Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out because he has a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his brain,” White House communications director Steven Cheung wrote in an email to The Washington Post last Friday. (Capitalised words are references to well-known Springsteen songs.)

Cheung, by the way, made for himself quite a reputation during the presidential election campaign with his very sharp, intelligent and often snarky retorts to real and perceived insults hurled at his boss. Trump has been very well served for a decade by this 42-year-old. Cheung left his previous job in 2016 and joined the Trump campaign’s communications and press team as Director of Rapid Response. His duties included “keeping the campaign up to date on breaking news and pushing back on false or unbalanced reporting,” according to a press release.

Now as White House communications director, Cheung continues to display one of the quickest wits in Washington DC.

Trump disappointment syndrome, and the welcome distractions of hockey and soccer

Now that we’re into the fifth month of the Trump II presidency, many normally discrete former officials are speaking with the media. Reading between the lines of some recent comments to the press, it’s hard to miss the profound sense of disappointment and apprehension about the future. In various forums, three of these former officials spoke out.

A former German ambassador to the US said “we had issues in those days (25 years ago in Washington), especially over the Iraq war. But I felt very confident as a German in the 1990s or 2000s that for the first time in many decades, Germany was now on the right side of history, that after the years under the Kaiser and then the Nazis, Germany was identifying with the West and was invited to be part of the West — especially by the United States. So, the German relationship with the United States, until now, has been something that created tremendous joy and satisfaction for Germans. Now, everything is uncertain and concerning.”

A former British ambassador to Ukraine and Georgia also looked back with fondness and satisfaction on a bygone era. “Britain and the United States were then (1990s) very much partners in terms of supporting the progression of democracy in both Georgia and Ukraine, and fighting corruption in Ukraine, supporting reform, the rule of law, human rights. Judging from what the president (Trump) says now, those former attitudes are, at a minimum, questionable.

“But I don’t think I’m massively surprised,” she continued. “We have a US administration that signalled quite clearly what its intentions were. Whether people chose to listen to that and understand is a different matter. I think it is incumbent upon Europe to think proactively: What are we going to do? How are we going to engage? Hand-wringing will get us nowhere.”

Finally, a retired senior Lithuanian official told reporters that “we had seen Donald Trump in his first administration. We talked about it. We had all the time to prepare. But we didn’t do that. It’s very difficult for us to admit that this is happening. And nobody could have prepared for somebody who would shatter the fundamentals, the foundations of trans-Atlantic relations.”

That’s all so discouraging. How about a little sports diversion and lift?

First, it’s good to notice that a National Hockey League powerhouse plays its home games in Broward County near the Sawgrass Expressway. The Florida Panthers won their first playoff series in two decades in 2022, and reached the title series in 2023. Last year, the Panthers returned to the Stanley Cup Finals, winning their first championship in franchise history over the Edmonton Oilers.

Florida has now beaten Tampa Bay for the second year in a row in the postseason, and is Florida’s strongest hockey team. They are building and sustaining success. And they won their first conference championship game on Tuesday.

And after beating Edmonton last year, the Panthers have just broken Canadian hearts all over again by beating the flagship professional hockey team in the Western Hemisphere. Alas, the iconic Toronto Maple Leafs have just been denied another chance for their first championship since 1967. The Leafs, with 13 titles, rank second only to Montreal. But it’s been nearly 60 years since the most recent one.

Soccer, meantime, is front of mind for millions of fans these days. A previously obscure club competition called the Club World Cup is coming to the US this summer, and there will be six early round games in June in Miami and three more in Orlando. Leo Messi’s Inter Miami team will play at Hard Rock Stadium next month.

Over in the UK, the English Premier League, by far the world’s strongest and most celebrated soccer association, concludes its regular season on Sunday. Liverpool clinched its record-tying 20th top flight championship several weeks ago under new Dutch coach Arne Slot, and the three relegated teams were also confirmed well before this week.

But below Liverpool, six teams are battling for four places in the next Champions League, Europe’s premier club competition. This year, clubs have earned almost $22m simply for qualifying. The payouts just keep rolling in as teams progress, with a total prize pool of over 26 billion dollars. No wonder the competition is so keen.

On Sunday, the remaining 2025-6 Champions League places will be won by four of the following clubs: Arsenal, Manchester City, Newcastle, Chelsea, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest. Chelsea visits Forest in the only head-to-head matchup.

Man City, which had won six of seven league titles entering this season, has suffered from success malaise, a few key injuries and impending departures from the team as it slouched out of the title race. Elsewhere, two members of the EPL’s ‘Big Six,’ Manchester United and Tottenham, have been massive, expensive disappointments and face big overhauls this summer.

Women’s soccer is thriving in the UK also. The Chelsea Women’s Club just wrapped up an undefeated Women’s Super League campaign to add to crowns in both English club competitions. A co-owner - Serena Williams’ husband - crowed that Chelsea Women are now “queens of the soccer world”.