The Bad Bunny Effect

The Witness Chronicles, 2/17/26

Photo by Zixi Zhou on Unsplash

It may have been a big mistake for MAGA to try and demonize him

There’s an interesting idea floating around about that 13 minute Super Bowl halftime show. I watched it and I thought it was great. But I’ve been to Puerto Rico twice and I loved it, so the cultural references resonated with me. Nothing like a native but I thought it was an uplifting portrait of a society that is part of the American story.

A portrait that is yet another revealing example of the ongoing racist underpinnings of the Trump administration. Remember the paper towels incident and the fact that they slowwalked FEMA help after devastating hurricane Maria. Their electrical grid was in terrible shape, a fact reflected in the segment with the electrical poles in Bunny’s performance.

That may have been the most political aspect of a performance that went out of its way to be a joyous celebration of Puerto Rican culture. But the popularity of the performance, an estimated 113 million viewers vs Kid Rock’s 7 million, most of whom apparently did not stick around for long. But a few electrical poles were not the significant aspect of choosing Bad Bunny.

He actually has talent.

Trump has been methodically demonizing Latinos and South America, claiming it as a part of the U.S. foreign policy block. This came after the kidnapping of Venezuela’s leader Maduro, a vicious dictator, which would be meaningful except for two facts. Trump left the existing repressive regime in power and impolitely ignored the opposition. The other factor was, of course, oil.

But the Bad Bunny performance brought focus onto the value of Latino culture and its popularity and it revealed that Americans are not solely interested in good old American stuff. No big surprise. The most popular Super Bowl halftime performances have all been culturally diverse.

This country is not a wholly white monoculture. No, it is far more diverse than that. It has always been that way. Immigrants are not outliers, there are what we are to the core.

Dictators always rise to power by creating others, those who are out to take over a culture. The Great Replacement theory that drives assistant White House chief of staff Stephen Miller is a mythology that seeks to define ‘real Americans’ as white people. But those white people, including my family, came here like everyone else, excepting indigenous Americans. And something about that.

In Minnesota, ICE and BPS grabbed up some native Americans, belying the lie that this is about immigration. They profile by appearance, and natives do not look white, which verifies this is all about racism, as it always has been in this administration.

I’m very interested in how their kneejerk reactions to virtually everything seem to always backfire on them. It is their greatest weakness that this shoot first, aim later approach has become normal across Trumpworld. Declaring Americans killed by ICE and BPS domestic terrorists pretty much destroyed any credible claims they have to justify the killings. And that is the pattern.

Trump’s immediate response to the NFL choosing a Latino performer getting the most visible platform on the planet was vicious, a leftover from the old school notion that football was a sport run by white people using black athletes, which was always ridiculous given the makeup of the NFL players. We are far past that, now that coaching is now based on winning records, rather than white skin.

But Trump still lives in that fantasy. Bad Bunny’s choice to sing in Spanish seems to be the tipping point for the MAGA hardcore racist elements. That didn’t work out so well. It’s a sign that those racial elements may not be the force that Stephen Miller thinks it is. A lot of us really enjoyed that show and that was a worldwide phenomenon, another fact that the America First folks would rather ignore.

But it won’t go away because it is reality, not some imagined world in Donald Trump’s brain. When you act without looking ahead, you will fail. That has been a pattern in his life, to create a fantasy version of reality and act based on that fantasy.

By the way, he recently announced that the economy is great and prices are falling. Is that your experience?

Getting all worked up about a performance at a sporting event is yet another intentional distraction cooked up by this administration. The really dangerous things they are doing are almost all aimed at corrupting the midterm elections in November and trying to hide the increasingly terrible things coming out of the Epstein files.

How far will these distraction tactics go? Pretty far as Trump orders two carrier groups to convene outside Iran. A quick war would do the trick for a little while. The fact that thousands of Iranians might die is a cost he is willing to take. This brinksmanship on his part is going to eventually cost American lives, which will almost certainly backfire on him.

But after the killings in Minnesota, we know a few deaths of Americans are worth promoting their racist agenda and keeping us from paying attention to what is really going on, including Trump’s blatant corruption to further enrich himself and his family.

All of this is a lot to keep track of and that is part of their strategy. They’re counting on us becoming too fatigued with the constant news until we simply no longer care. That has been a tactic of his since he first entered politics. But the events in Minnesota showed that we are paying attention, as are early election results.

If we ever want to get clear of this man and his enablers, we need to pay attention and act up. Otherwise this will be the story of our country for years to come.

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