MAGA’s fake Super Bowl halftime show reveals their real failures

If you’re looking for an illustration of “coping mechanism,” you’ll find no better example than MAGA’s reaction to Turning Point USA (TPUSA) announcing “The All American Halftime Show,” an alternative to the actual Super Bowl halftime show, airing on Feb. 8. The event doesn’t have a lineup or even a location yet. But what the far-right organization, co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk, does have is a groundswell of racist rage about the real Super Bowl halftime show, which will feature reggaeton star Bad Bunny.

There are contorted excuses for why MAGA is so mad that Bad Bunny, an American citizen born in Puerto Rico, would snag this plum gig. But absolutely no one is confused about the real source of the anger. Mr. Bunny, whose real name is Benito Martínez Ocasio, raps and sings almost exclusively in Spanish. The delicate snowflakes of the right react to that language, which is spoken at home by over 40 million Americans, like it’s the summer sun swiftly melting them into the whiniest vapor imaginable.

When TPUSA posted about their halftime show, there was a flurry of hyperbolic responses from MAGA followers, hoping that hate alone would somehow produce an entertaining alternative to one of the most popular artists in the world. It was, in other words, the perfect illustration of what the kids mean when they accuse someone of posting “cope.” But at least these MAGA posts were far funnier, albeit unintentionally, than anything Elon Musk has ever posted.

“This will be more watched than the Super Bowl Halftime Show,” posted the Donald Trump superfan Matt Van Swol. “Calling it right now.” This tweet received 8,000 likes, which is likely larger than the number of people who will watch whatever tepid program TPUSA throws together.

“Finally, a wholesome family halftime show during football,” wrote Susie Pollick, who presumably voted for a thrice-married adulterer for president. “The demonic evilness has to stop and be wholesome and make people smile and feel comfortable watching something.”

On their website, TPUSA asked people to vote on what genre of music they want to see featured. “Anything in English” was the first option, lest you worry they care more about music than they do about hating anyone they don’t see as white. The results haven’t been announced yet, so we can’t know if “Classic Rock” will beat out “worship” music. But on X, there were plenty of eager Trump fans offering suggestions about the kind of artists they think will top Bad Bunny, who has been streamed nearly 100 billion times on Spotify.

“Is it Creed?” asked The Conservative Alternative. He was not alone. User after user asked for Creed, a 1990s era rock band who last had a song on the Billboard charts 16 years ago. (Fun fact: When Creed’s first album came out, Bad Bunny was only 3 years old!)

In perhaps the saddest post of the day, a user named Saga mocked up a fantasy poster for the event that featured a murderers’ row of has-beens like Papa Roach, Nickelback, Staind and, yep, Creed.  Basically, the same array of CDs you’d find in the floorboards of the least dateable guy you knew in the 1990s. User Caesar declared that, with Creed as their cultural saviors, MAGA is prepared to “take culture BACK!” (Creed has not yet confirmed their role in restoring America to the pinnacle of greatness that was 1997 FM rock radio.)

As the Bulwark’s Will Sommer reported on X, some cheeky progressive satirized this by mocking up a fake poster for TPUSA’s halftime show, which promised Kid Rock, Ted Nugent and “a Guest Appearance by Measles.” Not realizing they were the butt of the joke, Trump voters went nuts sharing the flier. At least one MAGA man, complete with a profile picture of himself wearing sunglasses in the car, was suspicious. “Not on a TPUSA acct,” he posted, asking who the eff “is measles?” (A good question to ask Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)

Not everyone was begging for acts you’d usually expect to headline a cruise ship advertised to people who graduated college when Bill Clinton was president. Some people wanted music that’s even more unpopular. Multiple users demanded worship music, which is basically a blandly written verse and chorus about Jesus performed in an adult contemporary style that no one listens to outside of white evangelical circles. Lots of folks just posted pictures of Charlie Kirk, who wasn’t a musician. Many people, without having a clue who will perform, declared they would watch this instead of the real halftime show. Some of them seemed confused, thinking TPUSA had somehow canceled and replaced Bad Bunny with [fill in acceptably white person] at the Super Bowl.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., inadvertently captured the spirit of the moment when he was asked about Bad Bunny shortly after the Super Bowl announcement. Johnson claimed Bad Bunny is “not someone who appeals to a broader audience.” He instead recommended the 82-year-old Lee Greenwood, who is known for “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a song released a full decade before Bad Bunny was born. The speaker lies about pretty much everything, but even by his standards, it was pathetic to pretend this is a factual reflection of current American trends in pop music.

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All of this reflects what is a small ray of hope in our bleak political moment. MAGA’s relationship with pop culture only has two forms: Complete cluelessness and/or resentment that most people think their taste stinks. This matters, because it’s been a truism on the far-right for decades now that capturing the culture is the key to obtaining their larger political goals. MAGA influencers love to repeat, like parrots, Andrew Breitbart’s motto that “politics is downstream from culture.” The Christian right also has a version of this, which Kirk promoted: The “seven mountains mandate,” which holds that is crucial for conservative Christians to control pop culture. Over the years, untold amounts of money have been poured by right-wing donors and investors into remaking the culture in MAGA’s image, in hopes that will turn American hearts toward authoritarianism and evangelical Christianity.

But they are throwing their money to the wind. As I wrote recently, for all the hype around Kirk’s memorial, the actual event didn’t resonate beyond his existing fanbase. Nearly all the performers hailed from the world of worship music; there was nary a nod to what might resonate with people outside white evangelical subculture. This reflects a reality that the mainstream media ignored in the wake of Kirk’s murder. Even though he was widely known on college campuses, due to the ubiquity of his videos falsely promising to dunk on liberal college kids, he wasn’t well-liked. Although 94% of college students said in a recent survey they had heard of Kirk, a full 70% said they didn’t agree with his views.

But it’s not just with the youth that MAGA is failing to connect culturally. Earlier this month, The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt wrote about efforts by right-wing donors to capture the late-night comedy audience, which tends towards the AARP demographic. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were poured into five pilot episodes of “The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas,” hosted by a far-right author who specializes in faux-history books marketed as Christmas gifts for MAGA grandfathers who will never read them. The show — featuring people who were famous decades ago, like Carrot Top or Danny Bonaduce — was so terrible that even people who thought there could be a market for Christian nationalist “comedy” gave up on financing it.

An even bigger money sink may be the Daily Wire, a media company founded in part by MAGA wunderkind Ben Shapiro. As YouTube star José carefully documented a few months ago, “things are not going well at the [company].” In its early days, when it focused on serving a MAGA audience daily outrage bait and half-baked political commentary, the Daily Wire made a good amount of money. But its mistakes began when they started to yearn for a role in pop culture, a space their existing audience doesn’t understand and often actively hates. Efforts to make real Hollywood-style movies resulted in comically bad failures like “Lady Ballers,” which probably made more money for the content creators who used it as grist for their mockery mill.

It’s not written in stone that conservatives can’t make art. But MAGA couldn’t be better designed to repel the creative urge. The whole movement is based on a notion that difference is scary, change is bad and everything that’s happened since you were 11 years old is a travesty.

Fearfulness and intellectual laziness are kryptonite to the imagination. How can you think of something new when your ideological position is that everything new is bad?

Bad Bunny isn’t just alienating to MAGA because he makes Spanish-language music. Reggaeton is the perfect encapsulation of how real artists embrace difference, drawing inspiration from diversity that exposes them to sounds, visions and ideas they’ve never experienced before. It’s a genre that emerged from people combining hip-hop, dancehall reggae and all manner of Latin American genres, like salsa and merengue. It’s what comes from learning from the past but striving for the future, two modes of thought that MAGA rejects out of hand.

Instead, they’d rather beg for a halftime program that sounds so boring that even the people clamoring for it now probably won’t watch it when it happens. You can bet that most Americans, meanwhile, will be wiggling their hips to “Dákiti.”