The Super Bowl will be in California in 2026, but that didn’t stop the Texas attorney general from weighing in on the choice of the halftime entertainment.
On his personal X account, Ken Paxton said that country singer Jason Aldean should have been selected instead of the Puerto Rican rapper known as “Bad Bunny,” whose given name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio.
The selection of Bad Bunny was called “subversive” in a CNN headline, not because of the performer’s music, but his politics. He has been “overt” in his unhappiness with the Trump administration and endorsed former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race, CNN said.
He also made the decision not to include the U.S. in his ongoing tour because he said he was afraid of ICE raids.
He said on X after the announcement, “I’ve been thinking about it these days, and after discussing it with my team, I think I’ll do just one date in the United States.”
The post was in Spanish, which is the language of his performances. Rolling Stone reported that the show would make history for being completely in Spanish for the first time in Super Bowl history.
That in itself is enough to rile some supporters of President Donald Trump; the president in March signed an executive order making English the official language of the United States and saying that “the United States is strengthened by a citizenry that can freely exchange ideas in one shared language.”
And it raises the possibility of a performer making digs at the president in front of him, in Spanish, if Trump attends. (Last year, he was the first sitting president to go to the Super Bowl.) “There’s a lot of political lines that you can’t tell are political,” Bad Bunny said of his music in an interview with The New York Times.
Speaking to Glenn Beck, The Blaze commentator Jason Whitlock said the left was reasserting control of the popular culture by choosing someone who is “the poster boy for Trump hate and this is the poster boy for sexual fluidity and redefining masculinity.”
Others said that the NFL missed its chance to choose entertainers who could be unifying at a time of heightened political tension.
In a column for the New York Post, Kirsten Fleming argued that Bad Bunny was a poor choice, but one that reflects the NFL’s desire to build a fan base in Spanish-speaking countries. The NFL’s international slate of games for the 2025 season include venues in Madrid, Spain and São Paulo, Brazil.
“Bad Bunny, despite his bad music, has major crossover appeal,” Fleming wrote. “On Spotify, the rapper has been the most-streamed artist globally for the first three years of this decade. He joined Jennifer Lopez and Shakira’s show at the 2020 Super Bowl in Miami, has performed at WWE events and even stepped into the ring in 2023.”
The New Yorker recently called him “the biggest pop star in the world.”
He’s also scheduled to perform on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend.
It’s not unusual for there to be controversy about the halftime entertainment at America’s biggest football game, either before or after the show. Performances involving Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, and Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, sparked outrage because of their sexualized content.
But sometimes it seems the NFL cannot win: Adam Levine’s performance in 2019, in which the Maroon 5 frontman took off his shirt, was widely panned as boring.
The stakes are high, both for the NFL and the performer. Last year, an estimated 127.7 million people watched the game in the U.S. alone, which ratings company Nielsen said was “the largest audience for a Super Bowl and for a single-network telecast in TV history.”
Super Bowl halftime show entertainers are not paid for their performance, but industry analysts say the global exposure and sales after the show make it well worth their while — even if the performance is controversial.