The Wild Reed: Thoughts on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Thoughts on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl half-time show was one big love letter to his native Puerto Rico, culminating in a message of pride in his home and the Americas, and an appeal for unity with the U.S.

. . . The 31-year-old, who was the world’s most-played artist in 2025 according to Spotify, made history by becoming the first musician to perform entirely in Spanish at a Super Bowl, which is normally the most-watched event on U.S. TV. He did choose to say one line in English, “God bless America,” before listing nations of Central, South and North America as dancers carried their flags. Behind them, a billboard message read "The only thing more powerful than hate is love," and he held a football at the end of the segment bearing the slogan in English: “Together, We Are America.”

. . . Bad Bunny’s performance in Santa Clara, California, marked the first time the singer and rapper had performed in the United States - except for shows in Puerto Rico - since releasing last year’s Grammy Award-winning album Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I Should Have Taken More Photos).

Puerto Rico, which is a self-governing territory of the U.S.A., was at the heart of everything in this performance, from his early emergence from a sugarcane field to a set that was meant to represent the sounds and sights of the place he calls home.

Transporting himself through a Latin landscape, with set pieces that included everything from a nail salon to a bar, the Grammy award winner reeled off a medley of his biggest hits, including “Tití Me Preguntó,” “MONACO” and “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.”

Bad Bunny ended his performance by shouting “God Bless America” and naming multiple countries and territories, including Puerto Rico and the U.S., with those two flags carried behind him side-by-side.

Sunday’s show represented the best of Latin culture on the sporting world’s biggest stage.

– Annabel Rackham
Excerpted from “Bad Bunny Makes History
as Trump Criticises 'Terrible' Super Bowl Show”
BBC News
February 8, 2026

Bad Bunny didn’t just break the Internet and viewership records; he broke MAGA in a way that is deeply personal, and they hate him for it.

But they don’t hate him because he doesn’t sing in English, or because he’s been critical of the masked thugs they beat immigrants vicariously through, or because his pigmentation is problematic – at least those aren’t the primary reasons.

MAGAers hate Bad Bunny because he is a symbol of their greatest fears coming to life: a nation that is outgrowing them, a culture that is evolving past them, a war against progress that they know they’re losing.

They despise him because, over the course of a thirteen-minute halftime show that they swore they wouldn’t watch but couldn’t look away from, they were forced to see what’s happening outside of the insular, white nationalist echo chamber they spend their lives in, and it terrified them.

– John Pavlovitz
Excerpted from “MAGA Americans Have a Bunny
Living Rent-Free in Their Heads”
The Beautiful Mess
February 11, 2026

The MAGA efforts to degrade Bad Bunny have backfired horribly; instead, they've been fueling a global wave of support that has solidified his status as a cultural supernova.

Opponents attempted to weaponize his fluidity, using AI-generated imagery to frame his embrace of femininity as something sinister or "demonic." They tried to transform his expression into a source of fear, but the public saw through that distortion shit.

Instead of alienating his audience, these attacks highlighted the very qualities that make him resonate: his refusal to be shamed and his commitment to harmony and diversity. People feel the sincerity in his journey. He remains the former grocery bagger turned global visionary, curating a space of love and defiance that a manufactured smear campaign simply cannot touch.

– Ebony Ava Harper
via social media
February 11, 2026

The most popular act in music – the 31-year-old Puerto Rican pop king Bad Bunny – took viewers on a journey through sugarcane breaks and coco frio stands, past tíos playing dominos and a few diablonas perfecting their acrylics. Guest appearances included Ricky Martin, Jessica Alba, Lady Gaga, Pedro Pascal, Ronald Acuna Jr., and Cardi B. There was also a digitized sapo concho, the Puerto Rican crested toad.

An actual wedding ensued. Bad Bunny handed a Grammy award to a young boy who may have been a stand-in for his childhood self. A few lyrics rued the fate of the world’s oldest colony: that it might be further exploited, further degraded. Most of the rest were chiefly concerned with – and wholly successful at – eliciting gyration. The parting message was “God bless America,” which followed “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” and “Together, we are America.” The country and continents did not divide. The world did not end. There was not even a squall of brimfire.

If you’d indulged in any of the fuss coming out of the Trump-industrial complex, pre- or post-performance, you’d have thought that Che Guevara was headlining the intermission.

. . . That the most consumed artist of the decade, fresh off 15 top-10 hits and a Grammy win for Album of the Year, has become the latest focal point of the culture war is both a farce and wholly unsurprising. Despite his relatively nondescript, lower-middle-class origins (he grew up in the Almirante Sur barrio of Vega Baja; his father was a truck driver, his mother an English teacher), Bad Bunny has specialized in challenging conventions, audiences, hierarchies across his public life. . . . The tone of Bad Bunny’s music vacillates between observational, romantic, and braggadocious, but it is almost never preacherly.

This is not to say that it is not expressly political: He’s repeatedly voiced opposition to U.S. statehood for Puerto Rico, trashed the territorial bureaucracy that has allowed rounds of energy blackouts on the island, spoken out in support of the Puerto Rican transgender community, and toyed with sexual and gender norms on- and offstage. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, he called out Trump directly, writing, “F–K DONALD TRUMP! PRESIDENTE DEL RACISMO” in a statement to Time. He [also] voiced his objection to Trump’s mishandling of recovery efforts after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island.

– Lex Pryor
Excerpted from “The All-American Legacy
of Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show”
The Ringer
February 9, 2026

Bad Bunny’s official half-time show . . . was joyous and complex, intimate and historical, and it managed to do all of that all at once. It felt like a celebration of life, and you didn’t need to follow the words, because you just needed to feel the beat. (Asked if people must know Spanish to appreciate this show, Bad Bunny said: “It’s better they learn to dance. There’s no better dance than the one that comes from the heart.”) The performance concluded with a big banner that read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love” and with Bad Bunny holding a football (the U.S.A. kind) with text that read: “Together, we are America.”

That American conservatives saw that last line as “subversive” shows you the depths of the problem we face in this country. While some of us realize that we have and even like our neighbors, others seem to think we live, or should live, in a hermetically sealed-off land.

– Moustafa Bayoumi
Excerpted from “Why Has MAGA
Lost Its Mind Over Bad Bunny?”
The Guardian
February 11, 2026

This is the choice in front of us. You can accept Trump’s America, the America that governs through sieges, blockades, sanctions, and humiliation, deciding from afar who may rule, who may eat, and who must be punished into submission. Or you can stand with Nuestra América, the America José Martí and Simón Bolívar imagined, and that Bad Bunny echoed when he held up a football, reading “Together we are America.” This is an America that refuses domination, that believes no nation is a backyard, and that insists the future of this hemisphere belongs to its peoples, not to an empire. There is no neutral ground between those two Americas.

This is why the moment demands more than applause. It demands that we look past the spectacle and confront the systems that decide who gets to thrive and who is forced to flee. A real Good Neighbor Policy would respect sovereignty, stop weaponizing hunger and instability, and recognize that dignity does not end at the U.S. border. Bad Bunny reminded millions of people of connection, of shared humanity, of a hemisphere bound together by history and responsibility. What comes next is on us. If those 13 minutes meant anything, they must move us toward demanding a foreign policy that treats our neighbors as equals. Because in the end, the message is simple and uncompromising: The only thing more powerful than hate is love.