Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Moment Exposes the Myth of America's 'Anti-Woke' Turn

Donald Trump was furious. "The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!" he posted on Truth Social, his rage palpable through the screen. What had triggered the former and current president's ire? Bad Bunny's 18-minute performance that had just electrified 128 million viewers worldwide. In Spanish, no less.

Meanwhile, Alexis Wilkins, a political commentator dating FBI director Kash Patel, was having her own crisis. She hadn't even watched the show, but she could see the writing on the wall. The Democrats had just pulled off "fantastic branding" with their "All-American halftime with Bad Bunny" social media post, and Republicans were losing the messaging war they thought they'd already won.

The Phantom Vibe Shift

After the 2024 election, a narrative crystallized among American media figures. The "vibes" had "shifted," they declared, and America was no longer interested in entertainment or celebrities that were "woke." For the first time since 9/11, it was supposedly the right's turn to define culture.

"Here's how bad the Democrats fucked up: Trump is cool now," Bill Maher proclaimed last January as Trump took office. Emboldened billionaires who'd spent years paying lip service to liberal causes began openly courting Trump. Corporations gutted their DEI policies. Hot young people gave gleeful quotes to magazines about how excited they were to use slurs in public again.

As Ezra Klein noted in the New York Times, the shift seemed disproportionate to Trump's narrow electoral victory. "Trump's cultural victory has lapped his political victory," Klein wrote. "The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout."

But one year into Trump's administration, that cultural dominance looks increasingly questionable.

Culture's Stubborn Progressive Streak

The past year's cultural success stories paint a different picture. Sinners, a crowd-pleasing blockbuster that's also a parable about racial appropriation, dominated theaters. Heated Rivalry, a romance about gay hockey players fighting NHL homophobia, conquered the genre fiction world. The Grammy for Album of the Year went to Bad Bunny himself—the first Spanish-language album to win.

Politically, 2025's biggest star was New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who somehow charmed even Trump. Meanwhile, JD Vance gets booed at the Olympics, and even the manosphere podcasters who helped propel Trump to victory are criticizing his policies. "Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, 'Where's your papers?' Is that what we've come to?" Joe Rogan asked in January.

When Spanish Meets the Super Bowl

Americans don't seem to be falling into patriotic rage over a mostly Spanish-language halftime show. The complaints are coming from the usual suspects—former Real HousewifeJill Zarin, YouTuber Jake Paul—not mainstream America.

Bad Bunny's routine was a love letter to Puerto Rico, celebrating its identity as a culture in its own right. He could have gone further (he likes playing with gender norms in his outfits and began his Grammy speech last week with "ICE out!"). But the message came across anyway, partly because some people see a person of color speaking Spanish at an "all-American" event as inherently "left."

Ultimately, Benito ended his performance with two messages: "The only thing more powerful than hate is love," and "Together, we are all America." These are popular ideas that most Americans agree with—ideas it would feel almost perverse to oppose.

The Right's Counterprogramming Flop

The conservative response was telling in its failure. Turning Point USA ran a concert billed as "The All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show" (ironically using the same language Democrats would wink at in their Bad Bunny ad). The most prominent entertainer was perennial Trump supporter Kid Rock, who appeared to lip-sync at least part of his set.

Trump, with his animal instinct for where public attention flows, didn't post about the All-American show once. Early estimates show it drew 18 million views. Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance is projected to have reached 128 million.

The Billionaire Excuse

What we witnessed last year wasn't a genuine cultural shift but something more cynical: billionaires excited that Trump's win gave them an excuse to stop pretending to care about social justice, while irony-poisoned online trolls felt emboldened to shout slurs at splashy parties. But that didn't mean the entire country had embraced Trumpist cruelty.

Americans haven't soured on incredible grooves just because the lyrics are in Spanish. They haven't rejected the idea that love beats hate—in fact, they seem to find it especially compelling when the consequences of xenophobic hatred are playing out in the streets right now, in plain view.