The Moment
The NFL has apparently decided if you’re going to lean into the culture wars, you might as well stage them live on the 50-yard line.
For Super Bowl 60 in Santa Clara on February 8, the league has reportedly booked Green Day to open the game and usher in generations of past Super Bowl MVPs. This comes just a few months after naming Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican megastar and outspoken Trump critic, as the halftime performer.
Why is this touchy? Green Day’s frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, has spent years torching Donald Trump from the stage. At the Download Festival in the U.K., he called Trump’s administration a “fascist government” and led a crowd in shouting insults and “F*** Donald Trump.” He’s even tweaked Green Day’s classic “American Idiot” live to include the line: “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.”
Bad Bunny, for his part, has slammed Trump’s immigration policies, performs mostly in Spanish, and reportedly refused to tour the U.S. over fears his largely Latino fan base could be targeted by immigration enforcement. Trump has already raged about the halftime choice, calling the decision to give Bad Bunny the show “crazy” and “absolutely ridiculous” in campaign remarks last fall.
So now the NFL has an anti-Trump rocker and an anti-Trump reggaeton superstar on its biggest night of the year. Subtle this is not.
The Take
I don’t buy that this is the league “forgetting” about Trump voters. This looks a lot more like the NFL reading the room – and realizing the room is global, under 50, bilingual, and very online.
Think about who Green Day and Bad Bunny reach. Green Day hits that sweet spot for Gen X and older millennials: the people who grew up on American Idiot, Dookie, and eyeliner with opinions. Bad Bunny is one of the biggest artists on the planet, period – especially for younger and Latino audiences. That’s a powerful one-two punch for ratings, streams, and social clips, even if it gives Trump hives.
Will it rile MAGA world? Absolutely. It already has. Some conservative commentators were threatening boycotts months ago over Bad Bunny, before Green Day even entered the chat. Adding Billie Joe Armstrong – a man who has literally led crowds in anti-Trump chants – is like tossing a can of lighter fluid onto a grill that was already lit.
green day opening for the super bowl and bad bunny being the half time performance…. oh trump you are so OVER pic.twitter.com/wTeyYFHIFU
— Crouchy (@youngcrouchy) January 19, 2026
But here’s the thing: the NFL has played this game before. Every time the league books someone with a visible political opinion – Beyonce in Black Panther-inspired outfits, Eminem taking a knee, Rihanna showing up after years of turning the league down – there’s outrage, hashtags, and breathless cable segments. And then? The ratings are still huge, the sponsors stay, the clips go viral, and life goes on.
The Super Bowl is basically becoming the Thanksgiving table of American entertainment: everyone swears they’re done with it after one loud argument, and somehow they all show up again next year anyway.
So no, this doesn’t feel like the NFL trying to “own” Trump. It feels like the NFL is quietly accepting that Trump will yell no matter what, so they may as well book the acts who sell jerseys, streaming subscriptions, and international ad buys.
Receipts
- Confirmed: Green Day will perform the opening ceremony at Super Bowl 60 in Santa Clara, California, introducing former Super Bowl MVPs, according to a January 19, 2026 sports report and a matching league announcement on social media.
- Confirmed: Bad Bunny has been announced as the Super Bowl 60 halftime performer, as stated in the same January 2026 coverage and in an earlier official league reveal.
- Confirmed: Billie Joe Armstrong has criticized Donald Trump from the stage, calling his administration a “fascist government” and leading anti-Trump chants at festivals such as Download, documented in fan-shot videos and prior music press interviews.
- Confirmed: Armstrong has altered the lyrics of “American Idiot” in live performances to include the line “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda,” as seen in multiple concert recordings shared publicly.
- Confirmed: Bad Bunny has publicly criticized Trump’s immigration policies and spoken about concerns that his fans could be targeted by immigration enforcement, reflected in past interviews and social media comments.
- Reported, not independently verified here: Trump called the decision to have Bad Bunny headline the halftime show “crazy” and “absolutely ridiculous” and claimed he had never heard of the artist, according to an October 2025 campaign appearance quoted in the January 2026 sports report.
- Reported, not independently verified here: Some Trump supporters and right-leaning commentators have threatened to boycott the Super Bowl over the choice of Bad Bunny and now Green Day, based on reactions summarized in that same coverage and visible social media posts.
Sources
- January 19, 2026 U.S. sports article on Super Bowl 60’s musical lineup, citing league announcements and Trump’s prior comments.
- Official league and Green Day social media announcements confirming the band’s Super Bowl 60 opening performance, January 2026.
- Publicly available live performance footage and past interviews featuring Billie Joe Armstrong’s comments about Donald Trump and altered “American Idiot” lyrics (2016-2023).
- Public interviews and social posts in which Bad Bunny discusses U.S. immigration policy and his concerns for fans at U.S. shows (2018-2023).
- October 2025 Trump campaign remarks on the Super Bowl halftime choice, circulated in widely shared video clips and summarized in later sports reporting.
Backstory (For Casual Readers)
If you’ve only half-watched the Super Bowl over the last decade, you might have missed how political the music has become. After the league’s messy handling of player protests and the Colin Kaepernick saga, every halftime choice started getting examined like a Supreme Court nominee. Were they “too woke”? Not woke enough? Safe? Subversive?
We’ve seen Beyonce use the stage to reference Black Panther imagery, Jennifer Lopez and Shakira nod to immigration and Latin culture, and Eminem take a knee on live TV. Now the NFL is pairing Green Day – a band that’s been yelling about politics since the Bush years – with Bad Bunny, who embodies the younger, global, heavily Latino audience the league is desperate to keep.
Layer Trump on top of that, and every booking turns into a referendum on who the NFL “really” represents.
What’s Next
The safe bet? Expect at least one angry social post or rally riff from Trump as the game approaches, especially once promotional clips of Green Day and Bad Bunny start flooding feeds.
Watch for three things:
- The setlists: Does Green Day lean into “American Idiot” and those tweaked MAGA lyrics on Super Bowl night, or keep it more neutral?
- The ratings: If viewership holds steady or climbs, it sends the message that loud political complaints don’t actually move most fans off the couch.
- The sponsors: Big brands care less about Twitter outrage and more about whether families are still watching. If advertisers stay put, the league will see this as validation.
The Super Bowl has always been about football, spectacle, and money. Now it’s also a litmus test for where mainstream America really is on politics, culture, and who gets the mic. Green Day and Bad Bunny just happen to be the latest to sing us through it.
Your turn: do you think the NFL is getting too political with its music choices, or simply reflecting the artists and audiences that actually exist in 2026?
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