President Donald Trump has shown no problem going after the biggest superstars of our generation, repeatedly targeting Taylor Swift, peddling conspiracies about Beyoncé and bashing Rihanna ahead of her 2023 NFL Super Bowl halftime show performance.
But in this season’s Super Bowl, it won’t just be, say, the Buffalo Bills and the Philadelphia Eagles squaring off.
The NFL’s announcement Sunday that Puerto Rican musical sensation Bad Bunny — real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — will be the halftime performer drew swift condemnation from Trump’s allies.
On Wednesday night, as the MAGA outrage grew, a key member of the Trump administration provided a glimpse into how the government potentially plans to respond to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, touching on an issue that’s been central to the rapper’s recent criticisms of Trump: the president’s use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportations.
The NFL’s announcement Sunday that Puerto Rican musical sensation Bad Bunny — real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — will be the halftime performer drew swift condemnation from Trump’s allies.
In recent months, Bad Bunny has leveraged his star power to knock Trump’s immigration policies. The music video for his song “NUEVAYoL” — the intro track on his latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” — featured a Trump-like voice speaking over a boom box to say, “I made a mistake. I want to apologize to the immigrants of America. … I want to say that this country is nothing without the immigrants. This country is nothing without Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Cubans.”
The three-time Grammy winner cited frustrations with Trump’s effort to boost deportations as a factor in his decision to exclude the mainland United States from a stadium world tour in support of his album.
“Latinos and Puerto Ricans of the United States could also travel here, or to any part of the world. But there was the issue of — like, f—ing ICE could be outside [my concert]. And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about,” Bad Bunny told i-D magazine.
Those concerns were only heightened Wednesday night when Corey Lewandowski, one of Trump’s former presidential campaign managers, who is now serving as the chief adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson that ICE would have personnel at the Super Bowl because of the game’s halftime show performer.
“There is nowhere that you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally, not the Super Bowl, and nowhere else. We will find you. We will apprehend you. We will put you in a detention facility, and we will deport you,” Lewandowski said.
The backlash to Bad Bunny’s upcoming halftime show performance from the MAGAsphere largely stems from his long-running criticism of Trump.
In 2017, as Trump tossed paper towels to Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico, the proud Puerto Rican rapper went after the president for his hurricane response.
In 2024, when comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made racist remarks about Latinos at a Trump rally in New York City, referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage,” Bad Bunny posted a video celebrating Puerto Rico to his Instagram, sarcastically captioning the eight-minute ode to the island as “garbage.”
Bad Bunny also backed Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 presidential election, sharing a clip to his millions of Instagram followers of Harris saying she will “never forget what Donald Trump did and did not do when Puerto Rico needed a supportive and competent leader.”
When the Super Bowl comes back around in February, there will be real questions about how both Trump and Bad Bunny handle the moment — but no one should expect either side to play nice. The call to arms for ICE to police the Super Bowl is the latest evidence that the Trump administration will use the moment for a political statement. But there’s a real risk for Republicans in attacking Bad Bunny. Whereas there’s little downside for Bad Bunny to go after Trump, there are some potentially massive ramifications for Trump to go after the Puerto Rican rapper. Bad Bunny’s popularity, particularly among a constituency that Trump and Republicans are desperate to court — Latinos — means that any attack from the president against the performer risks ostracizing millions of fans, as well as millions of Latino voters who swung to the right last November. Trump has seemed to recognize more recently that it’s bad politics to attack massively popular pop stars. He’s decidedly toned down his Taylor Swift criticism, even responding to the news that Swift and Travis Kelce were engaged by saying he wishes them “a lot of luck.” “I think she’s a terrific person,” Trump said of Swift. But the question is, if Trump is provoked by Bad Bunny, would he really stay quiet? When Trump isn’t posting about the NFL’s new kickoff rule, he’s usually punching back against the latest criticism. He has mastered the politics of the aggrieved. And with a committed Trump opponent like Bad Bunny taking the stage, knowing there will likely be more than 100 million people watching, will the politically active rapper really pass up the opportunity to make a statement? And will Trump really be able to keep quiet if he does? It seems like a bad bet.
Nnamdi Egwuonwu is a reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
