MAGA Devolves Into Civil War Over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

MAGA is fighting with itself over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.

President Trump crashed out almost immediately after, complaining about Bad Bunny’s singing in Spanish and calling it a “‘slap in the face’ to our Country” in an angry Truth Social post. This is despite the fact that the message on the football at the end of the Puerto Rican artist’s show was “Together we are America.”

But others on the right praised the message. Conservative influencer Emily Austin said, “Bad Bunny had the biggest stage in the world and could’ve made it political. He didn’t. He chose unity & love. You can celebrate different backgrounds and still love this country.”

A former press aide to Trump, Harrison Fields, criticized conservatives who called Bad Bunny anti-American, saying, “Last time I checked, my Puerto Rico–born grandmother was a full American citizen—and she voted for Trump.” Vivianca Rodriguez, who worked on the Trump campaign, said that Trump supporters who complained were “alienating [the] Puerto Rican conservative base.” Even Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel, praised the “branding” of Bad Bunny’s show.

The right-wing discourse over the show also divided brothers Jake and Logan Paul. Jake, who called Bad Bunny a “fake American citizen,” was admonished by Logan, who said, “I love my brother but I don’t agree with this.”

“Puerto Ricans are Americans & I’m happy they were given the opportunity to showcase the talent that comes from the island,” Logan posted on X.

The MAGA right is probably going to fight over this instead of America’s actual issues. Some, like the president, can’t accept the fact that one of the world’s most popular stars speaks Spanish and is actually an American citizen born in a U.S. territory. Others recognize that Spanish speakers and Latinos vote too, and that most of the country didn’t switch to Turning Point USA’s alternative halftime show. The question is which side will win the argument.

Nearly 137,000 Iowans stand to lose their access to the Affordable Care Act marketplace if Representative Zach Nunn has his way.

The Hawkeye State Republican has gone on a tear against the ACA, slandering the health insurance solution as a form of modern-day human bondage while broadcasting his intention to dismantle the popular national program.

Last week, Nunn told the Westside Conservative Club that he believed the “ACA keeps people in a position of permanent servitude.”

“Let me be very clear: I am not in favor of the ACA going forward. We have a bill that will immediately end it,” Nunn said. “The ACA is one of the most destructive health care plans out there.”

Nunn maintained a similar tone earlier in January, when he told the “America first” podcast Steak for Breakfast that the Obama-era solution was a “disaster” that had “enslaved” its beneficiaries.

“The Democrats’ plan has failed, but let’s talk holistically about fixing it for everybody, not just the few people that are on the Unaffordable Care Act and have become enslaved into that program,” Nunn told the show.

The Affordable Care Act’s marketplace has had an immense impact on the way that America approaches health insurance coverage. Roughly one in seven U.S. residents are enrolled in the marketplace, according data from the Treasury Department. A record 24 million Americans signed up for coverage through the ACA marketplace at the beginning of 2025, roughly double the number of people who enrolled just four years earlier amid the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Yet Republicans have fought tooth and nail to repeal and replace the program since it was signed into existence in 2010. Donald Trump originally campaigned on the issue in 2016, promising to end Obamacare, though he and his allies have not yet been completely successful.

In July, the conservative caucus slashed $1.1 trillion from the ACA’s appropriations via Trump’s “big, beautiful” law. 

Despite the needs of his constituents, Nunn voted for the deleterious funding package, and in doing so contributed to the closure of multiple health clinics in his state that partially relied on federal funding.

They included a MercyOne clinic in Ottumwa, which is expected to close at the end of February, the MercyOne Family Medicine clinic in Traer, and the Henry County Health Center-Wayland Clinic. 

Several other Iowa clinics have had to lay off their staff or drastically reduce critical services, such as birthing clinics. Some of the impacted sites include the Pella Regional Medical Clinic in Ottumwa, the Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center, and  MercyOne clinics in Des Moines and Mason City.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans across the country are still waiting for the Senate to pass an extension for the ACA’s premium tax credits, which assist individuals making upward of 400 percent of the federal poverty level. The premium credits expired at the end of December and have yet to be renewed.

Republicans suddenly seemed shocked that President Trump is capable of racism after he posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes Thursday night. 

On Friday morning, longest-serving Black Senator Tim Scott called the video “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”—spurring other GOP senators and representatives to miraculously realize that Trump’s post was indeed racist. 

Representative Mike Lawler, who represents a swing district in New York, called out the president shortly thereafter, saying on X, “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive—whether intentional or a mistake—and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”

After Trump took down the video, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, whose Pennsylvania district voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, posted, “Racism and hatred have no place in our country—ever. They divide our people and weaken the foundations of our democracy.

“Whether intentional or careless, this post is a grave failure of judgment and is absolutely unacceptable from anyone—most especially from the President of the United States. A clear and unequivocal apology is owed,” Fitzpatrick added. 

Representative Jeff Van Drew too waited until after Trump deleted the video and said, “I condemn racism in any form.”

“These types of videos are morally wrong. Sadly, this kind of behavior happens on both sides of the aisle, and it needs to stop,” Van Drew posted on X Friday afternoon, without mentioning Trump by name. “We should be holding ourselves to a higher standard.” 

Representative Mike Turner also waited until Trump deleted the video, posting that he “didn’t feel the need to respond to every inflammatory statement made by the White House. However, the release of racist images of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama is offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable. President Trump should apologize.”

In the Senate, a few Republicans were willing to speak out.  

Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska posted, “Even if this was a Lion King meme, a reasonable person sees the racist context to this. The White House should do what anyone does when they make a mistake: remove this and apologize.”

Roger Wicker of Mississippi called the video “totally unacceptable. The president should take it down and apologize.”

Senator Susan Collins, who is facing a tough reelection campaign in Maine, piggybacked on Scott’s post, saying, “Tim is right. This was appalling.”

None of these posts demonstrate any real political courage, with most coming after the video was taken down. Trump has yet to comment on his post, and after his press secretary Karoline Leavitt initially tried to downplay the video, his staff later tried to claim one of them posted it without the president’s knowledge. The apology many of these members of Congress are supposedly demanding won’t come—not that any of these politicians were likely to hold Trump accountable anyway. 

The U.S. Marshals Service is defending a federal agent after a video of him violently kicking a small dog made waves on Friday morning.

The agent, part of the Memphis Safe Task Force that the Trump administration unleashed on the city last summer, can be seen in the video kicking the dog after it runs up barking at the agents’ K-9.

The dog is tiny, harmless, and really not doing anything to stop the agents from doing their jobs. Nevertheless, the U.S. Marshals played the victim.

“A woman at the apartment complex recorded the incident on her cell phone and posted the video to social media. While the appearance of the incident is unfortunate, the deputy marshal’s action was not done with malice,” they wrote in a statement. “It was a last-resort, split-second action taken by a law enforcement officer to control the environment and mitigate a dangerous situation. An uncontrolled, aggressive animal can hinder official duties and threaten safety.”

Under Donald Trump’s administration, the National Institutes of Health have slashed more than half a billion dollars in medical research on some of the leading causes of death in America.

A report published Friday by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, found that the NIH had gutted $561 million in funding for research on cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Despite research on these illnesses being fully funded by Congress, the Trump administration has chosen to terminate at least 320 grants mid-study and abandon thousands of patients across 304 clinical trials, including 69 trials for children. In addition to destroying years of work, the Trump administration’s actions have prompted an entire generation of medical researchers to question the viability of building a career in the United States.

So, how did the NIH decide what to cut? “The criteria for these decisions are not scientific. They are political,” the report stated.

Interviews with staff revealed that the NIH used a list of banned words to determine which research projects deserved extra scrutiny, including terms such as “COVID,” “climate change,” “diversity,” “disadvantaged backgrounds,” as well as multiple terms for Black men and women.

It’s worth breaking down what exactly losing that half a billion dollars detailed in the report has cost Americans.

The report found that the NIH has terminated or frozen 116 cancer research grants totaling $273 million. Included in that total was $20 million for the Duke Specialized Program of Research Excellence in Brain Cancer in North Carolina, where researchers investigated the leading cause of cancer deaths for children under 15.

The NIH has also terminated or frozen 65 Alzheimer’s research grants totaling $94 million, upending years-long research studies that were finally beginning to yield new drugs and diagnostic tools.

Additionally, the organization halted funding for 14 of the 35 NIH-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers, totaling approximately $65 million. The agency also canceled meetings of the National Advisory Council on Aging, delaying the disbursement of an estimated $600 million in grants. After years of bipartisan investment, the Trump administration cut the number of new Alzheimer’s research projects by nearly one-third in a single year, according to the report.

Despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to “Make Americans Healthy Again” by flipping the food pyramid upside down, the NIH actively gutted research into diabetes by $83 million and heart disease by $111 million.

Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at an FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, last week has led to some finger-pointing within the Trump administration.

On Thursday, President Trump was asked why Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was at the raid in which ballots from the 2020 election were seized. He responded by blaming Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying that Gabbard “took a lot of heat ... because she went in at Pam’s insistence ... and she looked at votes.”

“They say, ‘Why is she doing it?’” Trump said. “Because Pam wanted her to do it.”

On Friday at a press conference, Bondi failed to set the record straight when a reporter asked her about Trump’s assertion.

“DNI Gabbard was down in Atlanta last week for the Fulton County search. Originally, this office said that she was not part of the investigation. She put in a letter to Congress that President Trump directed her to do so, and then now President Trump yesterday said that it was at your insistence that she went down there. So what is the case here?” the reporter asked.

Bondi responded that she and Gabbard are “inseparable,” along with others who were at the press conference Friday (which included FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro).

“She was down there with Deputy Director Andrew Bailey of the FBI,” Bondi said, referring to Gabbard. “I’m not going to talk about any other details of that matter right now because Georgia is a very important issue to us. She was there, we’re inseparable, that’s all I’ll say.”

It looks like Bondi is trying to protect herself, avoid contradicting Trump, and cover for Gabbard at the same time. It’s very irregular for Gabbard, whose job is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence, to be involved in an investigation over supposed 2020 election fraud in Georgia (which was disproven in court long ago). Trump himself is unusually close to the investigation, discussing the Fulton County raid with Gabbard and FBI officials who were present. What is actually going on, and what is the end goal?

While he was in the process of being confirmed to run America’s public health policy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. swore several times over that his heavily scrutinized 2019 visit to Samoa, and the island’s subsequent measles outbreak, had “nothing to do” with his vaccine skepticism.

Newly revealed emails, obtained by The Guardian and the Associated Press, indicate that was not the case.

Emails sent at the time between a U.S. Embassy official and a United Nations staffer illustrate that the true intention of Kennedy’s trip was always about vaccines.

“We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine,” wrote Sheldon Yett, then a UNICEF representative to the Pacific Islands, in an email dated May 22, 2019.

Two days later, senior U.S. Embassy official Antone Greubel wrote to Scott Brown, who was at the time Donald Trump’s U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, about Kennedy’s planned trip.

“The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view),” Greubel wrote in an email dated May 24, 2019.

Greubel noted in the email that an employee at the U.S. Embassy in Samoa, Benjamin Harding, had “played some role in a personal capacity” to bring Kennedy to Samoa. Greubel communicated that he had told Harding to “cease and desist from any further involvement” with Kennedy’s travel.

Measles had not been a serious problem in Samoa until 2018, when two infants died shortly after receiving an improperly prepared version of the measles vaccine. In an attempt to understand what happened, the nation suspended use of the measles vaccine—but even after it was approved to reenter the market, the jab had lost trust with the Samoan public. As a result, the island’s vaccination rate plummeted from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones.

But within the folds of the vaccine pare-down, Kennedy and his anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense saw an opportunity: a chance to “measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines,” according to one of Kennedy’s 2021 blog posts.

After Kennedy’s visit, a massive measles outbreak hit the island.

Doctors from around the world traveled to Samoa to treat the virus surge, which resulted in 5,707 cases of measles. Ultimately, the widespread disease resulted in 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Samoan officials would later blame the epidemic on Kennedy and his affiliates, arguing that his virulent vaccine skepticism had fueled the disease’s spread by empowering the voices and credibility of local anti-vaccine activists.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, told NBC News in January 2025 that he couldn’t imagine anything “less ethical or more cruel” than Kennedy’s plan to put children at risk of death in order to gather data for an unfounded study.

But Kennedy, nonetheless, played dumb before the U.S. Senate in January 2025 as he sat on the cusp of monumental power, claiming that it wasn’t clear if measles had even been the cause of death among Samoans that year.

“We don’t know what was killing them,” the soon-to-be health secretary asserted at the time.

Samoans didn’t agree.

“It’s a total fabrication,” Samoa’s director-general of health Dr. Alec Ekeroma told the Associated Press in February 2025, adding that Kennedy’s comments to U.S. senators were “a complete lie.”

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture—which for a long time included measles—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running DHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—instead, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked.

TrumpRx, the website launched by the Trump administration Thursday to sell discounted prescription drugs directly to consumers, is offering a whole lot less than advertised. 

The drugs offered on the site are all from brand-name manufacturers, making them more expensive than generic brands. Almost all of the drugs are also covered through insurance already. The product pages on the website even say, “If you have insurance, check your co-pay first—it may be even lower.”

One X user fact-checked Trump’s claim Thursday that TrumpRx will lower the cost of inhalers from $458 to $51. In reality, clicking on the link on TrumpRx redirects the user to the manufacturer’s website to see if the buyer qualifies for hardship discounts. As the user pointed out, these discounts are available regardless of whether TrumpRx is involved. 

Another X user pointed out that the lack of generic drugs on TrumpRx makes prices higher than on prescription comparison sites such as GoodRx.  

“There may be patients who think this is a good deal and then end up financially worse off,” Rachel Sachs, a law professor studying drug pricing at Washington University in St. Louis who advised the Biden administration on drug policy, told The New York Times. 

“TrumpRx is a sideshow,” said Sean D. Sullivan, a health economist at the University of Washington. “I consider it not a real, serious effort in service to lowering prescription drug prices for Americans.”

Donald Trump has deleted a post from his Truth Social account that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

An unnamed source told Politico that “President Trump didn’t see the video (legitimately didn’t), a staffer posted it.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to downplay the video Friday morning, saying, “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

There’s only one primate in The Lion King, and that’s Rafiki, who is a mandrill. The clip is clearly not from the Disney film, either.

The video, which Trump posted Thursday night, drew backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike, including Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is the longest-serving Black senator in U.S. history. He said on X, “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”

Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican who represents a swing district in New York, said, “The President’s post is wrong and incredibly offensive—whether intentional or a mistake—and should be deleted immediately with an apology offered.”

Trump has a history of racism, especially regarding President Obama. Long before being elected president, Trump pushed the birther conspiracy that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., and has said, “Laziness is a trait in Blacks.” Did a staffer really post the video without Trump seeing it?

College professors are facing censorship and self-censorship as Donald Trump’s administration emboldens state lawmakers to increase scrutiny and surveillance on college campuses, The New York Times reported.

Universities in several states, including Texas, Ohio, and Florida, have adopted new rules requiring professors to share their syllabi in publicly searchable databases. While those guidelines have been celebrated by administrators and conservative activists for increasing transparency, they have also gifted online trolls with easy targets for their vitriol—particularly in departments that trigger conservatives, such as gender studies and Middle Eastern studies.

The recent surge in surveillance was born from the work of groups such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, said Dr. Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. TPUSA has spent over a decade developing a “watch list” directing angry mobs at professors who used the wrong words in class.

“Everybody is walking on eggshells,” Dr. Kamola told the Times. “Faculty are walking on eggshells. Administrators are walking on eggshells. Students are walking on eggshells. And what you get is the opposite of free speech.”

At an annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Dr. Dan Royles, a historian, advised “minimum compliance” with new rules. Royles and his panel discussed how to signal to LGBTQ+ students that their classes would cover topics pertaining to queer history without using keywords conservatives might use to target them.

“None of this is happening in good faith and we shouldn’t treat it as such,” Royles said.

Emboldened by Trump’s anti-woke crusade against higher education, conservative lawmakers are hoping to crack down on universities’ liberal tilt—or what others might call free speech.

PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman told the Times that while the new rules may seem innocent enough, “publishing syllabi when it is coupled with this McCarthyist environment is really dangerous.”

While Friedman acknowledged that conservative professors had faced social and career backlash from the left in recent years, “nowhere in that was a serious effort to use the power of government,” he said.

“The stakes of this are simply much higher,” he added.

After a student complained that their professor, Dr. Benjamin Robinson, had shared pro-Palestinian views and criticized the university, administrators at Indiana University cited a law meant to promote “intellectual diversity” to reprimand Robinson.

Robinson told the Times that the law’s vagueness was “utterly chilling,” and established a “hostile, suspicious relationship between faculty members and their students.”