On Sunday, Bad Bunny is set to perform in the Super Bowl’s halftime show, and President Trump is angry about it. “I think it’s a terrible choice,” Trump seethed recently, referring to the Puerto Rican performer and the band Green Day, who will also play during the San Francisco event. “All it does is sow hatred,” Trump added. “Terrible.”
Though Trump said that’s not why he’s skipping the event—it’s “too far away,” he insisted—this anger at Bad Bunny captures something important about our political moment. As many noted, it comes after Bad Bunny harshly attacked ICE during his Grammy Award acceptance speech, using the movement phrase “ICE out” and claiming of ICE’s victims: “We are Americans.” In response, the White House stupidly raged that he’d attacked “law enforcement.”
But something deeper is going on here than Trump’s usual lashing out at a critic. This clash hints at a genuine fear on Trump’s part that he’s on the defensive big time in the war over ICE—not just in the political war, not just in the war that’s shedding American blood in the streets, but also in the culture war. Because the battle over ICE has become a culture war all unto itself. And Trump is losing it.
The president has long regarded pro and college football—the players and fans, at least—as “his” part of the culture. During his first term, it was commonplace for him or other MAGA personalities to share video of football stadiums in red America cheering him wildly. His propagandists hailed these spectacles as barometers of what “Real America” believes. Just as Trump thinks that biker gangs, cops and coal miners naturally love him, he believes deep in his brainstem that all these tough guy players with forearm tattoos and their cheering, violence-relishing fans just have to be his people.
Indeed, Trump and MAGA have reacted with particular vehemence when opinions they despise have crept into the world of football. He raged wildly back in 2017 when African American football players took a knee to commemorate Black Lives Matter during playings of the National Anthem. Liberal Taylor Swift’s relationship with pro-receiver Travis Kelce became a source of deep angst on the MAGA right.
Trump also has a long history of criticizing changes in NFL rules that have made the game safer for players. “‘Sissy’ football is bad for America!” he seethed last fall, meaning it should be more violent and gladiatorial. As Dave Zirin, a journalist who covers the politics of sports, put it to me: “Trump views the NFL as a place where violence and toxic masculinity should be celebrated.”
In other words, this should be Trump’s cultural territory. Football has been an arena in which some of the biggest cultural battles of the Trump era have been fought—and Trump and MAGA seem to think it’s turf they should own exclusively. But it isn’t.
You could see this misplaced confidence on display last October, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared that ICE will be “all over” the Super Bowl, warning people to stay away unless they are “law-abiding Americans who love this country.” Translation: This is MAGA territory, and ICE will be hailed as conquering heroes here, so suck on that, libs!
Now, however, ICE enforcement operations there have quietly been canceled. In the interim, of course, ICE murdered two Americans in Minneapolis and protests against ICE raids have exploded across the country. As The New Republic’s Alex Shephard points out, these events have supplanted the Trump-MAGA cultural moment of 2024. It’s absolutely plausible that a significant ICE operational presence would now face hostility at the Super Bowl—hardly a spectacle Trump and Noem relish.
Lurking behind all this Trump-NFL weirdness is a broader form of hubris. Trump and MAGA have long assumed that MAGA-adjacent parts of the culture will rally to ICE violence. Notably, ICE is spending $100 million recruiting new agents with ads targeting fans of UFC fights, Nascar, guns, and military tactical equipment. ICE recruitment pitches and propaganda videos depict working for ICE as a type of militaristic and patriotic national service. It’s depicted as manly heroism, as an opportunity to engage in virtuous, cleansing violence that will purge the nation of its cosmopolitan, urban, diversity-loving, overly feminized, non-MAGA contaminants.
Yet large swaths of the culture—including typically MAGA-friendly ones—have now turned against all of this at a deep level, and some striking data from the new Marquette University poll shows how.
The poll finds that a whopping 60 percent of overall Americans disapprove of how ICE is handling enforcement. While a majority favors deportations in the abstract when subjects are not defined, a sizable majority—56 percent to 44 percent—specifically opposes deporting undocumented immigrants who have jobs and no criminal records and have lived here a number of years. Removing those people is core to making mass deportations a reality, and a robust majority rejects it.
The demographic breakdown of this data, provided to me by Marquette, is eye-opening:
- An overwhelming 58 percent of Americans without a college degree—a proxy for the working class—disapprove of how ICE is handling enforcement, while only 42 percent approve
- 50 percent of rural Americans disapprove of ICE’s handling of enforcement, while 50 percent approve
- 75 percent of men aged 18 to 29 disapprove of ICE’s handling of enforcement, while only 25 percent approve
- 54 percent of non-college Americans oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal records, while only 46 percent favor it
- 51 percent of rural Americans oppose those deportations, while only 49 percent are in favor
- 73 percent of men aged 18 to 29 oppose those deportations, while only 27 percent are in favor
So a lot of people in MAGA-friendly constituencies oppose what they’re seeing. That includes working-class and rural Americans and young men (who defected to Trump in big numbers and are a key target of pro-ICE propaganda). These are small subgroups, so we should be cautious, but other polls find the same: Fox News’s latest survey shows that 55 percent of working-class whites and even 50 percent of rural whites say ICE deportations are too aggressive.
A broad-based anti-ICE movement has spontaneously evolved. Countless ordinary people are now recording ICE with phones as an act of defiance in and of itself. Trump officials are trying to scale up enormous deportation prison camps—but when locations have become public, local populations have quickly organized, sometimes shaming warehouse owners out of selling to ICE.
When press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently lashed out at Bad Bunny for condemning ICE, she ripped into “celebrities who live in gated communities” for “trying to demonize law enforcement,” even mouthing the usual nonsense about “Hollywood and the elitist crowd.” In doing this, she tried to entangle the battle over ICE in time-tested cultural tropes.
But ICE’s paramilitary war on Americans has broken all those old culture-war signifiers. Most Americans no longer see ICE as hallowed “law enforcement,” because that fundamentally isn’t what ICE is practicing. Working-class voters oppose ICE and mass deportations. And an emblem of anti-ICE, pro-immigrant America is doing the halftime show at the Super Bowl. “Bad Bunny is a symbol of cultural diversity,” Zirin, the sports and politics journalist, told me. “If the NFL, many of whose owners bankroll Trump, see Bad Bunny as good for business, that’s very bad for the regime.”
In the culture war over ICE, Trump, that master manipulator of culture-war passions, improbably appears befuddled and uncertain how to proceed. His underlying project of mass deportations in service of ethnonationalist renewal faces widespread public condemnation. The old tried-and-true cultural barbs have lost their potency. Much of the energy is on the other side. In short: Whether Trump knows it or not, he’s losing this war very, very badly.
