Woke isn’t dead. Bad Bunny’s halftime show proved it.
As the NFL sent out a final marketing blitz for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, the official Democratic Party X account shared a picture of Bad Bunny in front of the American and Puerto Rican flags under the text “All-American halftime with Bad Bunny.” It didn’t sit right with one Republican.
“Unpopular: Republicans need to unite and get on better messaging because this branding is fantastic and allows all dems to get behind it. Also – super aesthetic,” wrote the political commenter and country singer Alexis Wilkins on X, quoting the post from @TheDemocrats in her message to her 88.2K followers.
Wilkins, who is dating FBI director Kash Patel, continued her argument on X the next day, after Bad Bunny’s show had already become a much-viewed and much-discussed sensation. She hadn’t watched, she said, but that wasn’t the issue. “My point was that we can’t give the left an inch of the ground we gained in the last election. … We all thought Bad Bunny was going to come out in a dress that said ICE OUT – but he didn’t. This would’ve all been easier to message if he did. They’re pulling the unity trope and we can’t let them have it.”
As Wilkins fretted over how the American public would receive the halftime show, President Donald Trump was already venting his outrage on Truth Social.
“The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” Trump posted. “It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World.”
Embedded in both Wilkins’s unease and Trump’s fury was the same concern. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show was an undeniable smash from one of the most popular entertainers in the world right now. It was also undeniably concerned with the dignity and humanity of residents of Bad Bunny’s native Puerto Rico and all of Latin America — which is to say, it had “woke” themes. And that didn’t stop it from being a hit at all! What might that mean for the culture wars?
The phantom vibe shift
After the 2024 election, a narrative developed among members of American media. The “vibes” (loosely defined) had “shifted,” they said, and America was no longer interested in entertainment or celebrities that were “woke” (also very loosely defined). Now, for the first time since the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was the right’s turn to define culture.
“Here’s how bad the Democrats fucked up: Trump is cool now,” said Bill Maher last January, as Trump took office. Emboldened, billionaires who spent years paying lip service to liberal causes began openly courting Trump, corporations gutted their DEI policies, and hot young people gave gleeful quotes to magazines about how excited they were to be able to use slurs in public again.
As Ezra Klein noted in the New York Times last January, the shift didn’t seem entirely justified by Trump’s narrow electoral win. “Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory,” Klein wrote. “The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout.”
Yet, a year into Trump’s administration, it seems less clear that the vibes are still in Trump’s favor. The cultural success stories of the past year have included Sinners, a crowdpleasing blockbuster that is also a parable about the horrors of racial appropriation, and Heated Rivalry, a genre romance about two gay hockey players struggling against the homophobia of the NHL. The Grammy for Album of the Year went to Bad Bunny himself, marking the first time a Spanish-language album won the award. The biggest political star of 2025 was New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who managed to win over Trump himself. Meanwhile, JD Vance is getting booed at the Olympics, and even the manosphere podcasters who helped propel Trump to victory in 2024 have been criticizing the policies he’s enacted in office. “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” Joe Rogan asked in January.
It certainly doesn’t appear that Americans en masse are falling into fits of patriotic rage about the idea that the Super Bowl halftime show was sung mostly in Spanish; the complaints appear to be coming from the usual suspects, like former Real Housewife Jill Zarin and YouTuber Jake Paul. Viewers also don’t even seem to mind the political message that was on display. As Izzie Ramirez explained for Vox, the whole routine was a love letter to Puerto Rico and a celebration of Puerto Rico’s identity as a culture in its own right. It would have been in character for Benito to take it farther (he likes to play with gender norms in his outfits, and he began his Grammy exception speech last week with the words “ICE out!”). But the message came across anyway, in part because the existence of a person of color speaking Spanish at an “all-American” event like the Super Bowl is seen as inherently “left” by some people.
Ultimately, though, Benito ended his performance with two messages: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” and, “Together, we are all America.” Those are both strong, popular ideas that lots of people in the US agree with and that it would feel almost perverse to take issue with.
Meanwhile, the right offered counter programming that didn’t have nearly the same cultural impact. Turning Point USA, the conservative campus organization that was the brainchild of the late Charlie Kirk, ran a concert billed as “The All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show” (the same language that Democrats would wink at when they posted their Bad Bunny ad). The show’s 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 the public’s attention is drifting, did not post about the All-American Halftime Show once. Early estimates have it drawing 18 million views. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, in contrast, is projected to have gotten 128 million.
If an event as plainly, brutally capitalistic and unconcerned with social justice as the Super Bowl can bring a cheering, joyous audience to its feet with a show celebrating the vibrancy of Latino culture — even as the Trump administration is violently arresting Latino immigrants without due process and claiming to be doing so at the behest of the American people — well, is the anti-woke vibe shift truly over? Did it even ever happen at all?
Last year, we witnessed a slew of billionaires excited that Trump’s win gave them an excuse to stop pretending to care about social justice, while irony-poisoned groypers felt emboldened to have splashy parties where they could shout their beloved slurs as loudly as they pleased. But that didn’t mean that the entire country had suddenly embraced the cruelty of Trumpism. It doesn’t mean that they are willing to ignore the power of an incredible groove because the lyrics sung over it are in Spanish. And it doesn’t mean they have soured on the idea of love beating hate. In fact, they seem to find it especially compelling and worth celebrating when the consequences of the Trump administration’s xenophobic hatred are playing out in the streets right now, in plain view of everyone.
Trump’s supporters are real, and they are committed. But it’s worth considering that perhaps American culture never truly belonged to Donald Trump at all.