They’re talking about it at Georgetown dinner parties, in group chats called “Bruce Boys” and on sunny days at the Congressional Country Club. They’re talking about it at Prost’s happy hour, in the bleachers at Nationals Park, in security meetings at City Hall and in at least one Republican office in the Senate. Maybe they’re talking about it at the White House — how could they not be? — but if you ask the people who work in the West Wing, they get skittish or don’t respond.

“Can’t piss off Trump,” one Republican operative says, declining an interview.

“I don’t think it would be a good look for me personally in my career,” says another, who declined to answer questions on the record.

On Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen brings his rousing anti-Trump roadshow to a capital city consumed by questions of loyalty under an administration that demands it. And for some Republicans, there can only be one Boss.

“We’re watching Donald Trump on a revenge tour, and as incredible as it sounds, it is not out of the realm of possibility that somebody could be spotted at this concert and be told they don’t need to show up for work on Monday,” said Doug Heye, a GOP consultant and perhaps the best-known Republican fan of Bruce Springsteen in the city.

While Springsteen has always been political, the “Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour” – unofficially the “No Kings Tour” — is his most defiant, most focused and most direct salvo in decades. He starts and ends a three-hour setlist with reborn protest anthems, “War” and “Chimes of Freedom,” and though at 76 he’s traded his black boots for more comfortable black Hokas, his voice sounds as vivid as ever.

He urges fans to choose love over hate, truth over lies and democracy over authoritarianism. He leads the crowd in chanting “ICE out now!” He channels John Lewis in calling for “good trouble, necessary trouble.” And he uses the encore not to pacify his audiences but to demand they act.

To the more-salt-than-pepper superfans who started lining up outside Nationals Park during a downpour Friday morning — six full days before the show — The Boss is, as he says, fighting for America as “an argument.”

For Trump loyalists, though, it’s complicated. The president escalated his long-standing feud with the musician last month by calling him a “dried up prune” with “a horrible and incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And then last week Springsteen played the next-to-last episode of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which was canceled because, as the Boss says, Trump can’t take a joke.

Republican fans have struggled with the tour since Springsteen announced it in February. For the first time in years, Chris Pack, a veteran Republican strategist, found it difficult to put off his chiding friends with the regular refrain about compartmentalizing the politics and appreciating the music.

Bruce Springsteen performs during the “No Kings” protest earlier this year in St. Paul, Minn. Tom Baker/AP

Early on, Pack, a longtime fan, bought tickets for a couple shows anyway. Springsteen was 76, and his daughter Lydia was 8. He cherished videos of baby Lydia dancing to “Nightshift,” and he made her first concert a Springsteen show in ’24. You never know how many more times you’ll get to do this, he told himself.

Out of love and trepidation, Pack subscribed to nugs.net, which livestreams concerts, and started following the tour. Springsteen intentionally kicked off in Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, places beset by raids from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His forceful speeches led Time magazine to call it one of “the most unflinching acts of musical and theatrical resistance mounted against Donald Trump—or any president, for that matter—in the nation’s history.”

One afternoon, Pack and his daughter were listening to a show in the backyard and throwing a Nerf football. His wife came outside, Pack remembered, and heard one of the speeches in which Springsteen criticized federal immigration agents for killing two people in Minneapolis.

“Whoa, what is she listening to?” his wife said.

She wasn’t wrong, he thought.

“You shouldn’t be taught that police officers all kill people and murder people in cold blood,” he told NOTUS later.

Pack decided to take Lydia to the bathroom during the most political parts of the show. But days later, he listened to a recording of Springsteen opening a show in New York with his monologue about how his beloved country was in the grips of a “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous administration.”

Pack listed his three Cleveland tickets for sale, and within 90 minutes, they were gone.

He took a loss, he said. But he didn’t care because he was standing up for friends in the administration who “don’t have a racist bone in their body.” He didn’t want to explain to his daughter why Springsteen insulted “people who were there for me during some of the lowest points in my life.”

Later, other Republicans echoed Pack’s criticisms of the tour. “Dark,” “divisive,” “vulgar.” They called Springsteen a class traitor, pointing out a significant portion of the working class voted for Trump, and they called him a hypocrite because he spent the show bashing the administration and then ended it by lamenting the yawning distance between neighbors.

“We sit with people at the ballpark, and they say, ‘I’m not going to that,’” said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia. “The guy’s a college dropout. I don’t need to hear him lecturing me about democracy.”

During a phone interview, Davis turned to his wife, Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, a former Republican politician in Virginia, and asked if she wanted to go to the Springsteen show at Nats Park.

“I’d rather be shot in the head,” she said.

One chief of staff to a Republican in the Senate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, conducted a small, impromptu poll of Springsteen fans on his staff. Two didn’t care about the musician’s politics, two did. It’s “puzzling that Springsteen doesn’t much care about possibly offending some of his long-time fans,” one of them said, according to the chief.

Springsteen fans wait in line for pit access before Wednesday’s concert in Washington. Kelley French/NOTUS

Other Republicans seemed to believe the safest move was keeping quiet. None of the three GOP lawmakers who represent New Jersey in Congress responded to requests for comment. Neither did spokespeople for the White House or for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the most famous Republican Springsteen fan of them all.

Christie, who’s been to 180 shows, was backstage earlier this month in Brooklyn and at Madison Square Garden. In Brooklyn, Christie went viral after it appeared that Springsteen snubbed him by walking by without shaking his hand. But the musician’s longtime manager told Rolling Stone the idea of a rift between the two was “absurd.”

In the pit line for the best floor seats, which grew to 50, then 100, then 250 over the long weekend, fans buzzed about whether Springsteen might have something special planned in Trump’s backyard. And while many were liberal Americans, the line was also full of tourists from all over the world who described feeling generally dispassionate about U.S. politics until forced to interact with them on this tour.

“Spring-Nuts,” as some fans call themselves, started lining up six days before the D.C. show to get front-row floor access. Sam Fortier/NOTUS

Jamie and Dawn Haydon, a Scottish couple, half-jokingly said they were nervous to tell the border patrol agent at the airport why they were here.

Greg Balind, a superfan from Australia whose email starts with the phrase “trampslikeus,” didn’t consider himself political, but specifically bought tickets for this show because the setting felt poignant. “America needs this, I think,” he said. “Watching from afar — you see it on our TVs, certainly every night — it’s in despair.”

Pablo Garcia, a Spanish man who lives in Indiana, arrived early enough to get No. 23. But on Sunday night, he got an email telling him to report to Kentucky on Tuesday for biometric tests as part of his application for a green card.

He asked his lawyer if he could reschedule it.

“This is not the dentist,” the lawyer said.

Garcia flew to Indiana, drove to Kentucky, gave his fingerprints and then drove back to D.C. He arrived at 2 a.m. Wednesday but lost his place in line.

Underneath the warmth of anticipation in the pit line was some of the same anger Springsteen channels onstage — and they focused on something the musician hadn’t said much about.

Many in line paid $500 or more for these tickets. They bemoaned the Department of Justice’s recent settlement with Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, which stopped what could’ve led to a breakup of the company under antitrust law. They bemoaned Springsteen’s participation in “dynamic pricing,” in which Live Nation’s algorithms used the tour’s popularity to drive the cost of floor seats into the thousands. They contrasted the coldness of the corporation with the warmth of Springsteen, negotiating the private tension of their own fandom.

Bruce Springsteen at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

As the D.C. show drew closer, some Republican fans remained unsure about whether to attend. They jokingly called themselves “closeted” and worried a mention on TMZ DC or in an insider newsletter like Politico Playbook would lead to retribution from the White House. They worried the feud between Springsteen and Trump would somehow escalate from social-media posts into real-world violence.

The Metropolitan Police Department did not anticipate an increased chance of violence and made no special security plans for this show, a spokesperson said.

One Republican who harbored no doubts about whether he’d attend was Heye, the consultant and longtime Trump critic.

“I can pump my fist to ‘Badlands’ and not have a concern in the world,” he said. “If putting on the red hat means you need to be nervous about going to rock concerts, then there are probably other issues at hand.”