The President turning Super Bowl Monday into a meltdown over a Spanish-language halftime show says a lot more about politics than it does about twerking.
President Donald Trump thinks Bad Bunny’s all-Spanish Super Bowl halftime show was ‘a slap in the face’ to America.
I think the only thing truly shocking here is how stale this culture-war rerun has become.
The show wasn’t an attack on the country; it was a mirror, and he clearly didn’t like the reflection.
The Moment
On Truth Social after Super Bowl LX, Trump unloaded on Bad Bunny’s halftime performance, calling it ‘one of the worst ever’ and ‘absolutely terrible.’
He complained that the Puerto Rican star didn’t perform in English, wrote that ‘nobody understands a word this guy is saying,’ and labeled the dancing ‘disgusting’ and inappropriate for children watching at home.
He went further, saying the show was ‘a slap in the face’ to the United States and ‘an affront to the Greatness of America,’ insisting it didn’t represent American ‘Success, Creativity, or Excellence.’
Donald Trump slams Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show: ‘A slap in the face to our country’
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Meanwhile, down on the field at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, the production was telling a very different story.
The turf was transformed into a sugarcane landscape with domino players, a street-style Latino wedding, fruit vendors, and utility poles that Bad Bunny climbed as he moved through a mostly Spanish-language set.
He performed hits like Titi Me Pregunto, Yo Perreo Sola, Safaera, Party, Voy a Llevarte Pa’ PR, EoO, and Monaco, all while carrying a football marked with the words Together, we are America.
On the stadium screens, a message flashed: The only thing more powerful than hate is love.
At one point, Bad Bunny rested his hand on a young boy’s head and handed him a Grammy, a moment that briefly sparked speculation online that the child represented a recent ICE detainee before it was clarified he was a young actor.
Surprise cameos from Lady Gaga, Pedro Pascal, Ricky Martin, Jessica Alba, Karol G, and Cardi B turned the field into a Latino family reunion with A-list plus-ones, while the Seattle Seahawks comfortably beat the New England Patriots 29-13 in the background of all this drama.
The Take
Let’s be honest: this isn’t about dancing.
We routinely watch 250-pound men collide at full speed, beer ads that are basically soft-core, and movie trailers that could give a 10-year-old nightmares.
If America can handle helmet-to-helmet contact every Sunday, it can survive a reggaeton beat and a few hip rolls.
This is about language, power, and who gets to look “American” on the biggest television stage of the year.
Trump’s line that ‘nobody understands a word this guy is saying’ lands especially badly in a country where tens of millions of people speak Spanish at home, and even more grew up with a bilingual household somewhere in the family tree.
He’s not confused; he’s offended that the performance wasn’t centered on him and people exactly like him.
Bad Bunny’s show was overtly political, yes – just not in the way Trump suggests.
The sugarcane fields, the domino tables, the neighborhood wedding, the fruit stands: these weren’t random props; they were shorthand for working-class Caribbean and Latin American life.
Pair that with a football stamped Together, we are America and a giant-screen sermon about love beating hate, and you have a pretty clear response to years of harsh rhetoric about immigrants and “real” Americans.
Trump has long been a fan of declaring things ‘un-American’ the second they stop flattering him – from NFL players kneeling, to awards shows, to musicians who won’t play his events.
Here, he watched a Spanish-language celebration led by a 31-year-old Puerto Rican who has built a global empire without switching to English, and he did what he always does: claimed the whole thing insulted the country.
It’s not a coincidence that Bad Bunny has publicly criticized Trump’s immigration enforcement in the past; the show pushed back on that worldview using dancers and staging instead of speeches.
The real “slap in the face” isn’t Spanish lyrics at halftime – it’s pretending that millions of Latino fans don’t count as American because their culture doesn’t come with a country twang.
And about that ‘disgusting’ dancing: pop music has been doing variations of the same routine since Elvis’s hips had church ladies clutching pearls.
The outrage cycles repeat – Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake in 2004, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez in 2020 – and yet somehow the republic survives, kids graduate, and the NFL prints more money.
The standards aren’t actually about modesty; they’re about who is allowed to be sexy, loud, and proud on a stage that used to belong almost exclusively to middle-of-the-road rock bands.
You don’t have to love Bad Bunny’s music or the staging to see what’s going on.
This halftime show said: America is bilingual, multi-ethnic, messy, and not waiting for permission.
Trump’s rant said: America should still look like a Norman Rockwell painting, just with better stock portfolios.
Receipts
Confirmed
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- President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social after Super Bowl LX, calling Bad Bunny’s halftime show ‘one of the worst ever,’ ‘a slap in the face’ to America, and describing the dancing as ‘disgusting’ and inappropriate for children.
- Trump criticized the performance for being in Spanish, writing that ‘nobody understands a word this guy is saying’ and claiming it did not represent American ‘Success, Creativity, or Excellence.’
- Bad Bunny headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, performing a mostly Spanish-language set that included Titi Me Pregunto, Yo Perreo Sola, Safaera, Party, Voy a Llevarte Pa’ PR, EoO, and Monaco, according to the game broadcast.
- The staging featured a sugarcane field built on the field, domino players, a wedding scene, fruit vendors, and utility poles, with a football labeled Together, we are America and a stadium-screen message reading The only thing more powerful than hate is love, all visible in the televised performance and widely shared clips online.
- Guest appearances during the show included Lady Gaga, Pedro Pascal, Ricky Martin, Jessica Alba, Karol G, and Cardi B, as shown during the halftime broadcast.
Unverified / Clarified
- Some viewers initially believed the young boy who received a Grammy prop from Bad Bunny onstage represented a specific child recently detained by immigration authorities; subsequent reporting indicated he was a child actor and not the actual detainee.
Backstory (For the Casual Reader)
If you’re not living on TikTok, here’s the quick primer.
Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, is a Grammy-winning Puerto Rican artist who helped drag reggaeton and Latin trap from niche playlists into full-blown global pop dominance.
He’s known for bending genres, blurring fashion rules, and weaving politics into his performances – whether that’s speaking out about Puerto Rico’s government or criticizing U.S. immigration crackdowns.
The Super Bowl halftime show, once the domain of classic rock and legacy pop acts, has become a high-stakes cultural referendum every few years.
Think: Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s infamous 2004 wardrobe malfunction, or Shakira and Jennifer Lopez’s 2020 show that provoked its own round of pearl-clutching over hips, pole dancing, and Spanish lyrics.
Trump, for his part, has a long history of using sports and entertainment as political punching bags, from complaining about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem to swiping at musicians who criticize him or refuse to perform at his events.
So when a Spanish-language superstar turned the most American of events into a bilingual block party with a message about love over hate, it was almost guaranteed he’d weigh in.
The question isn’t whether Bad Bunny crossed some new moral line; it’s whether the country is finally ready to admit that this – all the languages, all the cultures, all the noise – is what America actually looks like now.
Where do you land: was this halftime show too much, or exactly the kind of jolt a modern Super Bowl should deliver?
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