ANALYSIS – Cultural War at the Super Bowl : When the Halftime Show Becomes an Issue of National Sovereignty
By Angélique Bouchard
The 2026 Super Bowl will go down in the annals of American sports as a fractured national ritual.
For decades, the Super Bowl has been more than a mere sporting final; it has served as the great collective ritual of the United States—a moment intended to transcend partisan, racial, and cultural divisions in order to celebrate a shared national identity. Yet the halftime show, broadcast to over one hundred million viewers, has repeatedly become the stage for symbolic confrontations that lay bare the country’s deepest fractures.
On February 8, 2026, during Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Bad Bunny’s performance—almost entirely in Spanish, laced with references to Puerto Rican culture, tributes to the island’s history, and a message of personal affirmation—crystallized a head-on clash between two competing visions of America.
On one side stands a plural, urban, Spanish-speaking America, open to the demographic and linguistic diversity that already defines a significant portion of the population. On the other stands a mythologized America—Anglophone, white, rural or suburban—clinging to a traditional patriotism and a cultural norm perceived as under siege.
This artistic event, far from trivial, raises fundamental political questions: what place should minority languages occupy in the national public sphere? How can an entertainment spectacle become a stake in cultural sovereignty? And above all, in a society rapidly moving toward a non-white majority, who gets to define the “real America”? The controversy surrounding Bad Bunny reveals that the Super Bowl no longer unites; on the contrary, it exposes the growing impossibility of reconciling two rival national projects.
American Professional Sports as a Mirror of Identity Fractures
For more than a decade, America’s major sports leagues have functioned as privileged arenas for cultural warfare. The National Football League (NFL), with its historically white, rural, and conservative audience, and the National Basketball Association (NBA), more urban, youthful, and racially diverse, embody two contrasting models of managing political polarization.
The NBA has fully embraced a progressive stance: massive support for Black Lives Matter in 2020, social messages on jerseys, a collective playoff boycott following Jacob Blake’s death. This choice, denounced by conservative circles as commercial suicide, was offset by a strategic refocus on younger, international, and urban audiences, enabling a recovery in viewership.
The NFL, by contrast, navigates between demographic openness (expansion into Latino markets, diversified halftime shows) and appeasement of its traditional base. Past controversies—Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling in 2016–2017, the selection of artists deemed “woke”—have been experienced as betrayals of a sport long associated with patriotism. The Bad Bunny episode at Super Bowl LX exemplifies this tension: an attempt at cultural inclusion is reframed, in the conservative narrative, as a threat to national identity.
This divergence reveals a broader truth: professional sports cannot escape politics in a fractured America. It has instead become its primary vector, where every gesture, every song, every artistic choice is over-interpreted as an ideological statement.
A Spanish-Language Performance Perceived as an Aggression
Jorge Bonilla, analyst at the Media Research Center and regular Fox News contributor, authored the most structured piece in the series: “Why Bad Bunny’s polarizing Super Bowl halftime show felt like a slap at America” (February 9, 2026).
He describes the show as “polarizing and confusing for anyone who was not already a Bad Bunny fan” and accuses the artist of having “carefully constructed” a performance designed to mainstream “two toxic ideas”: Puerto Rican independence and the notion of a Latino identity as “a nation within a nation, a permanent immigrant status separate from the American mainstream.”
Language is central to this critique. Bonilla notes that had any part of the show been in English, viewers would have heard a positive message from Bad Bunny: “My name is Benito Martínez Ocasio. And if I’m here today at Super Bowl LX, it’s because I never, never stopped believing in myself. You should believe in yourselves too. You are worth more than you think.”
But that message, delivered in Spanish, is neutralized in his view, rendering the performance inaccessible and thus exclusionary to the majority of Americans.
Donald Trump’s Decisive Intervention
The controversy reached its climax with Donald Trump’s immediate reaction on Truth Social on February 8.
The president called the show “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!”, an “insult to the Greatness of America” and an “affront to our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence.” He added that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying” and that “the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children watching.”
This outburst, relayed in full by Jackson Thompson, is not mere aesthetic criticism.
It fits a well-honed rhetorical strategy: pitting a “great” America against an “insulted” one; elevating Spanish to a marker of identity threat; mobilizing the moral protection of children. By publicly endorsing Turning Point USA’s alternative via press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Trump transformed a cultural event into an official political act.
The Super Bowl, traditionally a vector of national unity, was thus turned into an ideological battlefield. This strategy, tested over a decade, remains effective: it keeps the base mobilized, polarizes opinion, and sets the terms of public debate. Once again, it illustrates Trump’s ability to turn popular culture into a stake of political power.
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Patriotic Counter-Programming as a Legitimate Response
Faced with what was deemed an “anti-American” spectacle, the initiative of Turning Point USA (TPUSA)—the “All-American Halftime Show” featuring Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett—was heavily promoted as a celebration of “authentic America.”
Madison Colombo (February 6) quotes Kid Rock: “There’s a large part of this country, whether you like it or not, that is underserved in entertainment. We’re just going to play for our base. You know, people who love America, football, Jesus.”
The “All-American Halftime Show” was not a one-off event: it exposed Turning Point USA’s strategic role as a key player in conservative cultural warfare. Founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk at age 18, TPUSA has become one of the most influential organizations in the Trumpist movement, with a substantial annual budget and a widespread presence on university campuses. Its stated goal: counter progressive (“woke”) hegemony in education, media, and popular culture by mobilizing conservative youth around free markets, patriotism, free speech, and opposition to mass immigration.
In the context of Super Bowl LX, TPUSA did not merely criticize the NFL; it went on the offensive by organizing explicit counter-programming, streamed in parallel and promoted as a celebration of “authentic America.” By headlining Kid Rock—an artist associated with Southern rock, the American flag, and anti-elite rhetoric—alongside country figures, TPUSA crafted a show that deliberately embodied the cultural opposite of Bad Bunny: Anglophone, white, rural, Christian, and patriotic.
This choice was deliberate. Since 2016, TPUSA has refined a strategy of “parallel institutions”: faced with a mainstream perceived as left-dominated, the organization builds alternative spaces that reject compromise in favor of cultural autonomy. The “All-American Halftime Show” fits this logic: it does not seek to win over the NFL audience but to consolidate an existing base while offering a ritual of belonging to those who feel marginalized by the league’s cultural globalization.
The link to political power is direct. TPUSA has been a loyal Trump ally since 2016, organizing rallies and mobilizing young voters. In 2026, with Trump back in the White House, the organization enjoys heightened legitimacy: press secretary Karoline Leavitt publicly announced that the president would watch the alternative show, turning a private event into a quasi-official act of cultural resistance. Hall of Fame running back Eric Dickerson bolstered the message by calling the NFL “one of the most corrupt organizations there is” and accusing it of doing “anything for money.”
This configuration clearly pits two Americas against each other: one multicultural, Spanish-speaking, urban—seen as elitist and disconnected; the other rural, white, Christian, patriotic—presented as the true, forgotten America.
At a deeper level, TPUSA embodies an evolution in American conservatism: from Reagan-era compromise to symbolic secession. This strategy, effective for internal mobilization, nevertheless intensifies polarization: it does not seek to reunite the nation but to solidify an identity bloc against a plural America perceived as a threat.
In the Bad Bunny episode, TPUSA did more than offer a musical alternative: it helped redefine the Super Bowl as a stake in cultural sovereignty, where defending the “real America” requires rejecting compromise with linguistic and demographic diversity.
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A Rhetoric of Civilizational Threat and Its Prospective Implications
The controversy surrounding Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX performance highlights a reality that many still refuse to acknowledge: traditional America—Anglophone, united by a common culture and patriotic values forged over centuries—faces a genuine and profound civilizational threat. By imposing a nearly exclusively Spanish-language spectacle laced with separatist Puerto Rican references and themes that implicitly reject assimilation into the American mainstream, Bad Bunny did not merely entertain a niche audience: he deliberately excluded the vast majority of viewers—those who see the Super Bowl as a moment of national unity rather than a platform for particularist identity claims.
This rhetoric of threat is not paranoid exaggeration but a legitimate response to a deliberate strategy: that of a globalized elite—including the NFL—that, under the guise of inclusion and commercial expansion, sacrifices the nation’s cultural heritage for emerging markets and progressive ideologies. Language is no mere detail: it is the primary vector of national identity. When an event as symbolic as the Super Bowl abandons English for another language, it sends a clear message: historic America is no longer the priority; it is relegated to spectator status in its own collective ritual.
The prospective implications are stark and alarming for anyone who defends the nation’s founding values. If the NFL persists down this path—prioritizing profits from Spanish-speaking communities at the expense of its traditional base—it will accelerate its own decline among the heart of America: white, rural or suburban, Christian families who have always formed the bedrock of American football. Unlike the NBA, which chose to alienate part of its audience by embracing militant progressivism, the NFL risks becoming trapped in a fatal ambivalence: neither “woke” enough to sustainably attract new markets nor faithful enough to its roots to retain its own.
More broadly, tolerating such performances without vigorous pushback would amount to accepting an irreversible fragmentation of national identity. Turning Point USA’s initiative and the massive support it received—including from the White House—demonstrate that a cultural counter-offensive is not only possible but necessary. It proves that the real America, the one that still believes in assimilation, a common language, and uncompromising patriotism, is ready to mobilize to reclaim its symbolic spaces. The 2026 Super Bowl is not a defeat: it is an awakening. If this dynamic continues, it could mark the beginning of a cultural reconquest that will restore traditional America to the center of the national narrative—before it is too late.
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Diplômée de la Business School de La Rochelle (Excelia – Bachelor Communication et Stratégies Digitales) et du CELSA – Sorbonne Université, Angélique Bouchard, 25 ans, est titulaire d’un Master 2 de recherche, spécialisation « Géopolitique des médias ». Elle est journaliste indépendante et travaille pour de nombreux médias. Elle est en charge des grands entretiens pour Le Dialogue.