Bono knows who he’s backing in the battle between Bruce Springsteen and President Donald Trump.
Asked if he was rooting for the rock star or the U.S. president during a Tuesday night appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the U2 frontman had the crowd roaring as he smiled and said, “I think there’s only one ‘Boss’ in America.”
Kimmel also got Bono to address one of Trump’s recent Truth Social rants, in which he accused the Irishman of being paid to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris... despite the fact Bono never weighed in on the 2024 election.
Before setting the record straight, the “Sweetest Thing” singer winked at Kimmel’s continuous clash with Trump, as he told the late-night host, “I don’t want to cut in on your action, because I know the president at 1 a.m., or 1:30, or whatever that was, is usually thinking about you.”
But the president seemed to have Bono and not Kimmel on the brain earlier this month, when he baselessly claimed the human rights activist and singer, along with Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé, had accepted money in exchange for publicly supporting the former vice president.
Though Bono said he was flattered to be named alongside such talented people, he reminded Kimmel and the audience that neither he nor U2 have ever been “paid or played a show to support any candidate from any party.”
“It has never happened,” he said, also noting how things on Truth Social seemed to be “pretty antisocial” and “not very true a lot of the time.”
The “With Or Without You” singer did have one “clue” as to how Trump may have mistakenly come to think he backed Harris. He suspected the president could have confused his nonpartisan human rights charity, the One Campaign, with a political project.
Though the One Campaign has no ideological allegiance, Bono revealed how even conservatives in its ranks aren’t pleased with how the Trump administration gutted agencies providing key humanitarian aid to people across the globe.
“We’ve got a lot of very religious Catholics, Evangelicals, conservatives who are very, very, very angry with the person that they voted into office” after he destroyed “instruments of mercy and compassion” like USAID, Bono said.
Talking about the time before the U.S. canceled 80% of the critical agency’s contracts, Bono said, “That’s the America that we love. That’s the America that we all want to be part of.”
“They are not happy,” he said of his fellow advocates. “And there will be trouble.”
While Trump’s reason for beefing with Bono seems to be fairly frivolous, the president and Springsteen have been locked in a war of words since the start of this month.
After the “Born in the U.S.A.” artist called Trump and his administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” during the opening night of his Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, the president shot back by calling Springsteen a “dried-out ‘prune’ of a rocker” and adding that he “never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics.”
Watch Bono’s full interview on Kimmel below: