Colbert had his moments. Kimmel landed some punches. And Robert De Niro sometimes seemed to be living rent-free.
But when it comes to a celebrity who could best Donald Trump and MAGA at the troll game — someone who shorted out the machine and sent smoke coming from its head, leading it to finally collapsing in a cultural scrap-metal heap — no one could finish the job. The machine just dodged, just deflected, just jujitsued back. And when that didn’t work, it just canceled, just suspended, just got them fired.
Until Bad Bunny came along.
“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,” Trump flailed shortly after Bunny’s wildly popular Super Bowl halftime show, the leader’s usually excellent troll standards unmet — if you don’t understand a word this guy is saying, how could you be a worthy judge of how successful he is?
But for all the thirsty cope of that Sunday-evening missive — you might as well just post a sign saying “I lost” — the truth is that Trump and MAGA have been failing on Bad Bunny for a while now. This is evident from the fact that they freaked out about his appearance months before it even happened and were moved to announce an ill-thought-out counter-programming halftime show whose only reason for being was untherapized rage. (More on that moral debacle in a second.) None of their criticisms stuck, including one they thought couldn’t miss. I mean, sure, part of Bad Bunny’s popularity is due to sex, but what isn’t?
So you want to know how Bunny did it. Simple. (But hard.) The rapper cracked the code of what breaks Trump and MAGA by sidestepping so many of the temptations of those who’ve tried before. He eschewed the cutting comedy and the matching bullying, neither of which is designed for success. You can never out-bully a bully, and sharp comedy isn’t a useful weapon in a fight like this. It’s like trying to avoid a Mafia hit by quoting Oscar Wilde.
Instead the 31-year-old deployed something far more effective: unflappability. Even when he was offering subtle digs, and there have been many, Bunny on the surface has not seemed to be reacting to anything at all. He has seemed indifferent and cool. Also, he had joy. Who would have thought this would be a viable weapon in our rage-filled decade? But when you as a powerful person go off about how awful someone is, all angry and vein-popping, and they just go right on being happy, no one questions whether there’s something wrong with the happy guy. They wonder whether there’s something wrong with you, and maybe it would be better if you just chilled and listened to some cool music? Yo hago lo que me de la gana, acho.
The old advice to laugh in the face of a bully has been transformed into something more strategic: don’t even acknowledge you heard the bully and instead just keep dropping Easter Eggs. Or, in MAGA terms, “troll without trying.”
Just the very existence of Bad Bunny, of course, triggers Trumpists. You can’t be born Benito Antonio
Martínez Ocasio, rap in Spanish and become the most streamed artist on Spotify for so many years and not provoke MAGA. If a movement’s whole mission is wresting people who look and talk like Bad Bunny from their families and sending them out of the country, then to hear the country say, “well, we actually kind of like what someone like that is doing,” it stings. A lot.
But Bad Bunny hasn’t been content just to let his success speak for itself. That’s pre-Trump thinking. No, he has embarked on a months-long battle operation of which we just saw the crescendo — the Gettysburg, if you will — during the Super Bowl Sunday night. Starting with the “four months to learn” from his SNL appearance and the unapologetically Spanish-language Grammys speech for album of the year last Sunday, the rapper has shruggingly been putting the onus back on Trump to explain why Bunny is bad, to figure him out, shifted the battle to MAGA’s backyard. Trump doesn’t like to be told he doesn’t know something and needs to learn it. And he really doesn’t like to be told he doesn’t know something and needs to learn it by a guy whose language and appeal he doesn’t understand.
Yet it goes even further than this. Bad Bunny isn’t simply challenging Trump to understand Latin culture; that’s relatively easily waved off, mocked away under cover of nativism/faux patriotism. No, the rapper has been sending out cloaked trolls, turning away with a sly smile and dropping political references like they’re just another piece of entertainment. He is not shouting out but making us lean in. And it’s frustrating the hell out of Trump.
There were scores of examples of this at the Super Bowl halftime show. Let’s just do a few. First, Bunny let out a “God Bless America”, which is really hard to go against, but then listed all the countries in the Americas, which drives the Firster crowd crazy. You can attack this, but then you’re kind of attacking the guy who just said “God Bless America.” (Of course Bad Bunny’s very existence as someone from Puerto Rico — Latin but as part of America not as easily demonizable as a foreign shithole — presents this dilemma too.)
Then there was the subtly political power-line climb. Those who knew, knew; the performer was commenting on the island’s blackouts and how government has failed its infrastructure. But others just saw a cool stunt of a musician climbing a pole. It was all such a fun Super Bowl dance party, and who can’t get with that, but then also what you’re getting with is a protest of the Trump Department of Energy’s decision to cancel $800 million in funds earmarked for the Puerto Rican grid to help out all those sitting in the dark.
And the flag — hey, he’s just waving a Puerto Rican flag. But wait, it’s the pro-independence light-blue flag, making a big statement while not making a statement at all. How ironic if, after Trump tried so hard to make Greenland a U.S. territory, Puerto Rico took the first steps to gaining its independence from the same cultural moment. Ditto the 64 under Bad Bunny’s wardrobe — is it about Hurricane Maria undercounts? The Congress that granted territoriality to Puerto Rico? You fill in the political blank. And the fact that you are already means he’s won.
Bad Bunny came into MAGA’s field — the NFL is their place, though really it’s all of our place — and spiked in their end zone, a gesture the rapper, in a rare but earned moment of unsubtlety, made literal with his football-slam closing the show Sunday night. Even Roger Goodell, hardly renowned as a Simon Bolivar-like revolutionary, offered his support.
In a 250th year that will surely see a massive White House unleashing of self-aggrandizement disguised as patriotism, Bad Bunny may have given us the real sesquicentennial celebration, casually embodying so much of the freedom, equality and celebration of the individual (in the face of a controlling government) the Founders built into their doctrines in the first place. Not for nothing did data point after data point show Bad Bunny won the day, especially with young people.
Hell, even the rumor that the boy he gave his Grammy to was the targeted-for-deportation five-year-old Liam Ramos landed. It wasn’t Ramos. But the fact that so many of us were even ready to believe it — believe this sly low-key roast of ICE — showed how successfully Bad Bunny has crafted his campaign.
The easy chill with which Bad Bunny was dropping disses without seeming to drop disses became even more apparent when it was taken with the other vision, the MAGA vision. Rarely has pop culture opened windows onto two such emotionally and ideologically distinct forms of entertainment simultaneously, but it did Sunday night with the alternative Turning Point USA Halftime show, conceived as an “all-American” event (even the wordplay is cringe) after Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl performer.
I flipped between the two telecasts Sunday night, like some kind of dueling-spectacle whiplash, or maybe psychosis-inducing lab experiment. The pure joy of dancing, of eating ices, of wedding proposals and ceremonies — none of that was in evidence over at the TP Show. What we got there was a dose of anger and victimhood, mostly about the “real Americans,” as a Brantley Gilbert song had it — a song incidentally so organic and Johnny Cash-like it came about because Hulk Hogan asked him to write something for his upstart wrestling league. The track also contains the unintentionally ironic lyric (unless it’s an anti-ICE dogwhistle?) “I am a real American/Fight for the rights of every man.”
The spiritual linchpin of the TP show was the appearance of the country singer Lee Brice, who previously had a tearjerking hit with a first-person confessional about driving the truck of his brother killed in Afghanistan (Brice didn’t write it, and his actual brother was a contestant on CMT’s Can You Duet?). The star Sunday night sang a new song, “Country Nowadays,” that can only be described as a masterwork of conjured victimhood and invented bogeymen.
“I just want to catch my fish, drive my truck, drink my beer.” (Who’s stopping you?) “I just want to cut my grass, watch my game, say my prayer.” (Seriously dude, no one is stopping you.) “Not get a picture of a flag up in flames while people cheer.” (What streaming service are you subscribing to, man?) While back on NBC Bad Bunny was throwing to the man who lived la vida loca.
It’s funny — for years Republicans got the better of Democrats by saying they were playful and having a good time while Democrats were too busy being sour and whiny and self-victimizing. And now Bad Bunny, with an assist from whatever passed for an executive producer of the TPUSA halftime show, had totally flipped the script. Actually, it was shocking — the very sense-of-humor-filled playbook that young conservatives said (often justly) that they wrote and that Dems didn’t understand was stone-cold swiped by an anti-ICE Puerto Rican rapper, while the very syndrome the GOP had cackled was Democrats’ undoing became their own go-to move. Hard to point fingers about all the identity politics after that YouTube spectacle.
Perhaps the best conservative media response to the Super Bowl came with the Washington Examiner headline on the show, which said simply, “Bad Bunny Is Bad.” Great stuff. Is it too late to coin “owning the cons?
The mistake so many celebrities made until now is trying to beat Trump at his own chess game. That’s wrong. He’s the master — the Bobby Fischer of the competition. You can’t do that. Instead you play a different game, and in the process expose how absurd his is. Because a bully can get their way pulling pigtails on the playground. But Bad Bunny excels at winning the rap battle in the club parking lot, and which one would you rather have on your side? Me las vo’a llevar a toa’ pa un VIP. Ey saluden a Tití.
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