A MAGA MELTDOWN ensued this week when Grammy-winning, top-streaming, international superstar rapper Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, was announced as the halftime show headliner for Super Bowl LX.
The arguments were the usual bland fare: He doesn’t sing in English, he’s un-American, and of course the classic—why can’t we have another artist like Creed!
Bad Bunny is, indeed, Puerto Rican. But, last we checked, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. His critics didn’t seem to have concerns when other performers born outside the United States—U2, Rihanna, the Rolling Stones, Shakira—got the Super Bowl honor.
But the MAGA acolytes are right to be worried about one thing.
Bad Bunny, who is fresh off a record-breaking 31-show tour in Puerto Rico, does what he wants. And he made that clear in his 2020 album YHLQMDLG—short for Yo Hago LoQue Me Da La Gana, “I Do What I Want”—widely considered the best reggaeton album of all time.
Before I go further, I should make clear my Bad Bunny bona fides. I have been a fan since 2017, before his first album came out, when I saw him as part of a Latin Trap show at Barclays in Brooklyn. His first album provided a balm during a difficult time in my life in 2018, and when the dance- (perreo-)heavy YHLQMDLG dropped in February 2020, it provided a soundtrack for a truly dispiriting pandemic year, bookended by the moody alt-rock El Último Tour Del Mundo that November.
When the world opened back up again, I was at the Barclays Center for his EUTDM tour in March 2022, then in Miami a month later for the same tour for my future brother-in-law’s fortieth birthday. I saw him at Yankee Stadium that summer for the World’s Hottest Tour after his stratospheric rise to pop superstar off his Un Verano Sin Ti album, which is still Spotify’s most-streamed album of all time. Last year, I saw him on his Most Wanted Tour. We wore cowboy hats.
To put it succinctly, there is no other artist like him.
Which is why I feel confident predicting that come sometime in the evening of Sunday, February 8, 2026, Donald Trump should get ready for the most high-profile protest of his presidency so far.
At a time when many artists and institutions are self-censoring in order to stay out of the MAGA target lines, Bad Bunny has done just the opposite. He highlighted the killing of a trans woman in Puerto Rico during a Tonight Show performance, and performed songs not just empowering women but also pushing back against toxic masculinity, with lyrics telling men to let women dance alone if they want to (“Yo Perrero Sola”) or to allow them to walk the streets without being harassed (“Andrea”). He has also tackled issues of corruption and colonialism, like when he paused his tour to protest Puerto Rico’s governor, protests which rocked the island and led to the governor’s ouster, and in his sublime yet haunting “Lo Que Le Paso a Hawaii,” which details his wish that Puerto Rico not become the 51st state for fear its heritage and culture will become subsumed by the U.S., akin to what happened with Hawaii.
Most of Bad Bunny’s advocacy is wrapped in his Puerto Rican pride. He’s not pretending to represent all 62 million Latinos in the United States. Yet young Latinos across the country, whether of Puerto Rican descent or not, still see themselves in him. His success is a north star; his authenticity is proof for how bicultural Americans can live their own lives.
The question has never been whether Bad Bunny will continue to be authentic. It’s whether that authenticity could survive in the Trump 2.0 era—and, now, how it will translate when put on one of the world’s largest stages.
“He will have the room to be as political as he wants to be,” Julyssa Lopez, Rolling Stone’s deputy music editor, told me. “Benito has been the most-streamed artist in the globe for several years now, so you would hope he has enough bargaining chips to do what he wants.”
IT’S NOT HARD TO IMAGINE BAD BUNNY using the Super Bowl to go after Donald Trump. After all, he’s done it before, with critiques at times measured, and at other times fiery.
In October 2017, a month after Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico, leaving thousands dead, Bad Bunny wore a shirt at a benefit concert for the island that said (in Spanish) “Are You a Tweeter or a President?” It was a direct jab at Trump, who had maligned the island from his phone and millions of U.S. citizens who were struggling to survive and get back on their feet.
After George Floyd’s killing, Bad Bunny embraced the Black Lives Matter protests in an interview with Time magazine, first commenting on the systemic injustice taking place, but turning his ire towards Trump.
“The President of the United States has made it clear since the beginning of his presidency that discrimination against Latinos is more than present; he has given even more power to racism at this time,” he said.
Last year, Bad Bunny endorsed Kamala Harris after a speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
He has continued speaking out this year, even as the administration’s immigration crackdown has spread to working people, taxpayers, and churchgoers. He told i-D magazine that one of the factors that led to his decision to stay put in Puerto Rico and not visit the mainland was because he didn’t want the specter of masked ICE agents outside his concerts waiting to throw his fans into unmarked vans.
“There was the issue of—like, fucking ICE could be outside [my concert]. And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about,” he said.
As ICE began undertaking raids of Dominicans in Puerto Rico, he shared a message for Dominicans, whose music, like mambo and dembow, he has incorporated into his songs. “Puerto Rico is your home, too,” he declared.
Among his fellow Puerto Ricans, there is an expectation bordering on conviction that he will use the stage to showcase over fifteen minutes of “Puerto Rican excellence.”
Carlos Calderón, a popular Puerto Rican influencer with over 1.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, told me he believed Bad Bunny will “1,000 percent” poke at Trump and ICE during the performance. “It’s a Super Bowl, it’s supposed to be something fun and enjoyable, but now everything is political,” Calderón said. “They don’t see it as music, they see it as Latinos being more powerful. They feel intimidated—as you should, we’re right here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
The issue of ICE and immigration overreach will plainly be front and center at the Super Bowl. And not just in a philosophical sense but a literal one: DHS whisperer Corey Lewandowski recently told a MAGA commentator that ICE will have a presence outside Levi’s Stadium during the Super Bowl, while criticizing the “shameful” Bad Bunny announcement and accusing the NFL of being too “woke.”
“There is nowhere that you can provide safe haven to people in this country illegally. Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else,” Lewandowski said.
Bad Bunny chroniclers say they’re not surprised by the reaction. Bad Bunny’s existence is in itself a form of resistance. His booking at the Super Bowl is simply a high-profile demonstration of it.
“He’s the first male Latino headliner, with the first fully-Spanish halftime performance,” Julyssa Lopez told me. “That in itself feels like resistance, its own type of protest. We’ve seen the right-wing reactions, people asking are Bad Bunny songs in English? People are having a meltdown over how politicized Spanish and immigration have become.”
THE SUPER BOWL HALFTIME SHOW and its 125 million-plus person audience is no stranger to political messaging. Lopez reminded me of when Shakira and Jennifer Lopez headlined the halftime performance in 2020. With Bad Bunny and J. Balvin in supporting roles, the two artists had a “kids in cages” portion of the show, in an effort to bring awareness to Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy.
But that was the first term. Overt political messaging during a second Trump term has been far less visible after institutions across the nation were cowed by a revenge- and censorship-minded administration. There will, undoubtedly, be intense pressure on Bad Bunny to play it straight.
In JLo’s documentary Halftime, she said the NFL pushed back against her political statement, but she forged ahead. The stakes feel even higher now. And the pressure on Bad Bunny—not just from the NFL but from Latinos eager to see him speak out—will be immense.
“I’m excited for him to do the Super Bowl at a time when we are being scared into hiding, into not speaking Spanish in public and worrying someone might hear us and call ICE on us,” said Julissa Arce, an author and activist, who recently announced she is writing a book about Bad Bunny. “At a time when literally the Supreme Court decided if you are Latino, if you look Latino, you can be targeted. Meanwhile, Bad Bunny his whole career has been saying those are the things we need to hold on to. They give us power.”
