'Existential crisis' hits MAGA as Super Bowl show leaves Trump scrambling: analysis
President Donald Trump's reaction to Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show has left MAGA facing an uncomfortable truth about its own movement, a political analyst claimed.
While Bad Bunny drew a staggering 113 million viewers, those in the MAGA sphere sought entertainment elsewhere. Kid Rock performed at Turning Point USA, providing an alternative to the Grammy Award-winning artist performing during the Super Bowl break.
The performance from Bad Bunny is enough for MAGA members to reconsider what the public wants — and it was made worse by Trump's rambling response to the ceremony, according to Christopher Bucktin, writing in The Mirror.
He suggested the show had been a stress test MAGA may not survive.
He wrote, "For most viewers, Bad Bunny’s show was exactly what the Super Bowl has long claimed to celebrate — scale, swagger and culture. For MAGA, it was an existential crisis. Spanish lyrics. Brown bodies. Dancing that didn’t look like it came from an Arkansas country bar in 1987. Clearly, civilization was under threat."
Trump's response to Bad Bunny's show fueled the MAGA fire further, Bucktin suggested. He added, "It was less cultural critique than an unhinged aging uncle shouting at the television — except the television was winning.
"What made the outburst even more revealing was Trump’s apparent failure to grasp a basic fact: Bad Bunny is from Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is American. Its people are American citizens. The president of the United States attacking an American artist as foreign is not irony; it is Trumpism in its purest form. If it doesn’t look or sound like his America, it doesn’t count.
"MAGA’s solution, as ever, was to retreat into a parallel reality. Rather than engage with the halftime show the rest of the world was watching, Trump-aligned groups promoted an “alternative” performance headlined by Kid Rock — marketed as a wholesome, values-driven counterweight to the NFL’s spectacle."
Bucktin also noted Trump had abandoned the MAGA showcase Kid Rock had put on and instead voiced his distaste for the Super Bowl halftime show.
He wrote, "Even Trump, a man famous for inflating crowd sizes, didn’t bother watching. Instead, he tuned in to Bad Bunny like everyone else, before angrily informing the world that he hated every second of it. And then came the awkward part MAGA would rather forget."