When Bad Bunny sang at the Grammy Awards ceremony in 2023, his performance was described in closed-caption subtitles simply as “singing in non-English.” But whether most Americans understand his lyrics, he is indisputably an international icon.
Last week, the National Football League announced him as the halftime show headliner for the 2026 Super Bowl. He will, undoubtedly, be singing in Spanish. And surely, con política.
The Super Bowl may be one of the country’s last bipartisan unifiers, but it would be naïve to imagine that politics would suddenly be set aside.
Within hours of the announcement, Greg Kelly, a host on Newsmax, called for a boycott of the N.F.L., fuming that “da bunny,” as he labeled him, “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, hates the English language! He’s just a terrible person.”
The Puerto Rican superstar — legally named Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio and affectionately called Benito by his loyal fans — has said that he avoided touring in the continental United States this year in part because he feared that federal immigration agents would target those shows.
The Trump administration essentially confirmed those fears as Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, said on Friday that immigration agents would be “all over” the event. Her special assistant, Corey Lewandowski, was even more explicit, saying: “We will find you, we will apprehend you, we will put you in a detention facility and we will deport you.”
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The post How Will Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Show Shape U.S. Politics? appeared first on New York Times.
