TPUSA’s Halftime Show Is An All-American Tragedy

The Super Bowl is not American enough for MAGA.

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Ariane de Gennaro is a communications intern at the Renew Democracy Initiative and an incoming JD candidate at Harvard Law School. She previously wrote for the Yale Daily News and worked in the office of Senator Mazie Hirono.

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Apparently, the Super Bowl is not American enough for MAGA. Over the past week, thousands of pro-Trump Americans have taken to social media to call for a boycott of the nation’s biggest sporting event. They’ll be changing the channel tonight, not because they hate the players or the game, but because they hate the halftime show.

The controversy centers on the NFL’s selection of the Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny for the halftime headliner. The right hurls barbs at Bad Bunny for his Spanish-language music (not English, and therefore not American), his fashion (rumors swirl that he will wear a dress), and his politics (vocally anti-Trump). The claim is that Bad Bunny does not represent the Super Bowl’s audience, and—as one X user put it—that the NFL is “out of touch…with their fans.”

Some of Bad Bunny’s haters won’t just be skipping his game day performance. They’ll be watching an alternative halftime show, put on by Turning Point USA. Instead of Bad Bunny, the “All-American Halftime Show” will feature the Trump-friendly Kid Rock. The latter doesn’t have a Grammy, but Kid Rock’s “Rock n’ Roll Jesus” did win best foreign pop album at the 2009 Hungarian Music Awards!

Yet the existence of the All-American Halftime Show is an all-American tragedy, for the Super Bowl is one of the last remaining cultural events that we all share. In the age of streaming and curated algorithms, people cater entertainment to their particular preferences. There are few programs that we continue to watch live. Consequently, common cultural experiences are hard to come by.

The Super Bowl, by contrast, is the most widely viewed television event in the US, by far. Super Bowl LIX set a viewership record of over 127 million. That’s more than a third of the country. If we can’t watch the same Super Bowl halftime show together, what can we do together?

Until now, the Super Bowl has had broad-based appeal, uniting Americans from across the political spectrum. Football culture certainly carries some right-coded stereotypes (masculine, rural, conservative, to name a few), but Super Bowl viewership in particular defies these caricatures. By 2025, roughly 45% of Super Bowl viewers were women. While White Americans make up the largest share of total viewers, Black Americans are among the most likely to tune in relative to their share of the US population. In recent decades, Hispanic viewership has also been rising—the NFL cited the Latino audience as one of the reasons to feature a Spanish-language performer. I can also confirm from personal experience that many liberals and even leftists watch football. Even those who aren’t season-long fans tune in to the annual event for the cultural moment it represents—and, yes, for the halftime show.

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The NFL’s audience is as uniform as America itself—which is to say, not at all. If the league is “out of touch” with one segment of its fans, it is very much in touch with another. In other words, even when it comes to the one event that most unites the country, our culture is sharply divided.

After all, a quick sweep of social media will show that for every complaint, there is an equal and opposite wave of delight in response to Super Bowl LX’s musical acts. One post, with over 14,000 likes, reads: “If you’re anti-Trump and are definitely watching Bad Bunny and Green Day’s performance, drop a [heart]...” A much larger group surely does not care, and will neither boycott nor applaud these choices. They would be watching the Super Bowl regardless, for the entertainment and the spectacle.

Which brings us to the main reason the NFL selected Bad Bunny: because he will put on a show. President Trump says he’s “never heard of” Bad Bunny, but the rapper is one of the biggest artists in the world, with over 80 million monthly listeners on Spotify. He was Spotify’s Global Top Artist of 2025, and was the fifth most-streamed in the United States. Most recently, he won the 2026 Grammy for Album of the Year. Bad Bunny further angered MAGA when he called out ICE in his Grammy acceptance speech, but his audience is so big that any detractors will hardly put a dent in his wider popularity.

The NFL is not taking a political stance. It is making a savvy business decision to claim a big name for its marquee event and tighten its hold on growing markets. Sure, the NFL could have chosen a less controversial performer. But the real question is, why would they? Bad Bunny will almost certainly still bring in the big bucks, and his selection has generated media buzz to boot.

If the NFL’s business decision carries political implications, those are secondary to the revenue the league expects to rake in. If the gamble pays off, the result will still be an enormous payday. Even if viewership dips at the margins, the Super Bowl will remain the most-watched television event in America.

Turning Point’s alternative will surely have a fraction of the NFL’s audience. While claiming to be “All-American,” it hardly represents America as a whole. Instead, it showcases one, narrow idea of what it means to be American. It posits that the real halftime show is un-American because it does not align with a certain ideology. Ironically, nothing could be less American than shunning those with whom you disagree.

Americans increasingly demand that their celebrity idols match their values to a tee, ditching artists and actors who say things they disagree with and even those who say nothing at all. The push to boycott Bad Bunny shows that the right is just as capable of the sort of hypersensitivity and cancel culture that we associate with the left-wing “snowflake.” If the right doesn’t want to listen to Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl halftime show, they can hear Kid Rock at the All-American Halftime Show. If you’re tired of “woke” Hollywood, you can watch movies produced in-house by The Daily Wire. If America’s campuses are too left, you can go to Bari Weiss’s University of Austin.

In reality, this is not a partisan issue; it is an American one. Americans on both sides of the aisle are increasingly isolating themselves to their own likeminded political bubbles. We tailor our media consumption and our algorithms, and we scarcely have to interact with beliefs different from our own.

Tonight, millions of Americans will still be watching the Super Bowl. Yet our widening cultural schisms should be a cause for concern—already, their effects are felt far beyond the football field.

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