Americanswers! Why is Trump so annoyed about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The United States is about to mark its 250th anniversary. And so on the Global Story podcast from the BBC, we're telling surprising tales of American influence on the world stage and in ordinary people's lives all across the globe. We have this ability to export our story and a lot of people have bought it. I feel like the American dream is alive but not well. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, I have to say that, Justin, I'm pretty surprised that you are able to make this episode, given that you must have been up all night watching your favourite artist headline the Super Bowl.

0:49Bad Bunny? OK, look, word of explanation for those who haven't come across my love for Mr Bunny before. It's actually my daughter, Clara. Mr Bunny. who is a fan of Mr. Bunny's and is also a Spanish speaker and very keen on the whole Spanish side of it. So she, I was in contact with, she says it was very good, not too political, she says, before the end. So I suppose the question, is that also going to be the finding of those Americans who watched it in the United States? Because one American who watched it in the United States, We know already, don't we, guys did not particularly appreciate it.

1:29Yeah. Shortly after Bad Bunny's concert finished, halftime concert finished, Donald Trump was on his True Social website posting his take on it. And it was not a positive one. He said it was absolutely terrible. One of the worst ever. He said it made no sense. It was an affront to the greatness of America. Didn't represent our standards of success, creativity or excellence. Nobody understood a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the USA and all over the world. By and large, a not positive review from the commander in chief.

2:05OK, so we'll be answering your questions about Bad Bunny, but you've also been asking us about other things as well. What's going on with ICE is a perennial. We get to that almost every session at the moment. The Epstein files as well, and there is more to be said about them, but also how the president has dealt with the backlash after that video, that racist video involving Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as well, the one that he posted to his social media page. So all of that about to come. Welcome to AmeriCast.

2:34AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh, dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

3:01Hello, it is Mariana in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London. And it's Justin in Bath today in the English West Country. And it's Anthony here in Washington, D.C. Justin, I always kind of picture you when you say you're in Bath, lounging in a hot tub with the phone by your ear, recording this with steam all around you. Yeah, well, you've got it in one then. That's exactly what I'm doing. But in your imagination, Anthony. Nobody else wants to have that thought. But if you have it, that's great. OK, it sounds like a bad... I feel like there might be a bit of an X-rated podcast. Yeah, it could be, which brings us very nicely onto Bad Bunny and his performance at the Super Bowl.

3:45So it was the Super Bowl, this massive, massive sporting event, but also, of course, just a massive cultural event. The day that my daughter Clara was born in the US on Super Bowl Sunday 2004, very difficult to get help in the hospital when my wife was having Clara, although we forgave the nurses because it is a big U.S. event. And it really is. It's one of those things, isn't it, Anthony, that just brings the nation out. I don't know what the viewing figures were this time around, but you don't have to like American football, basically, to be part of the Super Bowl. And it's not just the halftime performance, is it?

4:24It's the adverts as well and all of the stuff around it that people put so much effort into. Right. People throw Super Bowl parties. They all gather together. They have chips and salsa and beer, and it's a social event as much as it is a sporting one, probably more than it is a sporting one. And the advertisements, as you mentioned, are a big thing. People spend$8 million just for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl ads, Super Bowl program. So it all becomes very focused on what are the different companies going to talk about and what are the big issues that they're going to be pushing. AI, of course, being the biggest one, it seems, this time around.

5:05And then also, as you mentioned, the halftime program is usually something people watch and comment on. There's been a whole variety of different celebrities and singers and artists who have done halftime shows. But this with Bad Bunny was the first time that an entire halftime program was done in Spanish and not English. And I think that definitely reflected a portion of the American culture that hasn't gotten coverage, hasn't gotten the attention of mainstream culture in any sort of way like this. Yeah. OK, so look, we had a question from Rafe in London who asks us this, really following on from that, Anthony.

5:46Could the Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance shift the narrative about Latino people in the US, especially with the current climate around the killings of Alex Pretty and Renee Good? Or are people just too entrenched in their views? But, Mariana, what has changed in the world that you look at? Were there entrenched people who are suddenly unentrenched? I somewhat doubt it. Yeah, as we know very well in social media land, everyone who is entrenched stays pretty entrenched. And it's quite interesting because when you wake up and you haven't stayed up like you, Justin, to watch your favourite Bad Bunny, and you see all of this unfold on your social media feeds or in my case on my undercover voters, my fictional characters that have profiles on the different sites and they sit across the political spectrum, you'd think that people were watching entirely different events because you've got people who love Bad Bunny, who think it was absolutely brilliant and love, you know, the kind of message of unity and love Trump's hate and that sort of thing and all of the kind of flags of the Americas and everything else.

6:49And then on the other side, you've got lots of pro-MAGA influencers who thought it was terrible that it was all in Spanish. And what I would say is quite interesting is I think a lot of people, because of the comments that Bad Bunny had made at the Grammys, thought that he might say something explicitly critical of Donald Trump and or ICE. and he actually didn't do that in the way that people thought. And I think that that has gone down quite well with someone like Gabriela, who is a Latina undecided voter, who actually, like her feed is mainly people just praising the performance itself, like the choreography and that it had loads of energy and it was really exciting to watch.

7:24And so actually, to some extent, I think that to answer the question that Rafe has, I think probably for people who aren't tuned into the whole, you know, everything around sort of immigration and ICE and a kind of staying out of it a bit, it probably did reinforce quite a positive image of people who are Puerto Rican or from Latin America. Right. At the Grammys, you'll remember Bad Bunny said ice out, very political, very direct. He didn't say anything like that during this halftime show, which began kind of in the sugar plantation field that they had created in the in the center of the football stadium.

8:01He went through kind of a tour of Puerto Rican culture, coffee shops and dancing. There was an actual wedding ceremony at one point. He gave his Grammy, went into a room and gave his Grammy to a small child that looked a lot like Liam Ramos, the five-year-old who was detained in Minneapolis. It wasn't him, but there was a lot of speculation that maybe it was him or was supposed to be him. And then that ending that you mentioned with all of the flags of all of the Americas and Bad Bunny ticking through all of the countries and saying we're all together, including the United States and Canada and all the Latin American nations, including Cuba, for instance, that had a very powerful message.

8:47I think one that is very different from the America dominated Western hemisphere that you hear Donald Trump and a lot of conservatives talk about. I just felt, I don't know what your view is, Anthony, just listening to it, I was thinking 20 or 30 years ago, certainly when Obama came to power, Americans would be saying, look at us, we've got this amazing cultural event. We've held it almost entirely in a language that is not spoken by most people in our nation. And they would celebrate it. And yet now it just seems to me the atmosphere is so poisonous that you can't anymore. And there'll be plenty of Americans who say it's a bit of a cultural abomination, really.

9:26Why speak a language that we don't speak in this big cultural event? To say that the United States is a melting pot, that there's strength and diversity, that used to be kind of pablum. That was kind of a non-controversial thing for an American to say. Now, as you rightly point out, it is politically charged when you have Trump and conservatives talking about Western civilization and Western culture and protecting our homeland and protecting our culture. They do so in a way that is, at its heart, exclusive. And so here you have Bad Bunny saying, God bless America, which is a term that a lot of people use to celebrate kind of a traditional view of America, white America, Christian America, and then using that to describe all of the Americas and not just the United States, but from Chile through the Caribbean all the way up to Canada.

10:21That, yes, it maybe wouldn't have been controversial at one point, but now very, very pointed, very political, even if Bad Bunny wasn't up there saying ice out, wasn't being directly political. The message there was clear for those who wanted to see it. Just on the politics of it, just going back to Rafe's question, because it's really important. He's asking, does the Super Bowl performance shift the narrative about Latino people in the U.S.? I mean, that's interesting because the narrative actually has been that Latino people, of course, as Rafe, I'm sure, knows, went for Donald Trump in the last election in staggering numbers, nearly half of them, actually, and certainly record numbers in, well, in recent times.

11:06It's certainly in the times when the Latino vote really counted for something. There were enough people to make a difference. I mean, he won in all sorts of places. We've discussed it before, haven't we, Anthony? One down in Texas on the border, wholly Latino counties or sort of 95 % Latino counties going for Donald Trump. And the first time for some of them that ever voted Republican in a majority sense. So the narrative was massively that he was doing things for working class Americans and many, many Latinos are working class Americans to the extent that you could say they are increasingly the backbone of working class America, you know, particularly the men on the construction sites, et cetera, et cetera.

11:50So the narrative actually was they were enormously positive about Donald Trump. But the issue now, as Rafe, I suppose, is pointing out, Anthony, is that that narrative, because of all that's been happening recently, has really changed. Yeah, Texas, South Florida as well, Miami-Dade County, where Miami is, was carried by Donald Trump for the first time in decades. A remarkable turnaround as a lot of South American voters, South American descended voters rallied behind the Republicans and Donald Trump and not just the Cuban Americans who have been traditionally conservative. So, yeah, it was a remarkable achievement that Donald Trump pulled off in 2024.

12:31And I think now, as you say, the concern is that Trump is alienating that. And if we look at what Rafe is saying and if there's any kind of a consequence of the Super Bowl, it may not be the halftime show per se and what was in the show and what Bad Bunny did. It would be the reaction to it from Donald Trump and from other conservatives pushing back and saying, why are they speaking a language I can't understand? I couldn't understand any of it, that the dancing was inappropriate, that it wasn't an American message. I think that could alienate a lot of the Latino voters who rallied around Donald Trump in the past.

13:13And actually, if you look at some of the reaction, I think Mariana can speak to this. It wasn't unified among conservatives that this was awful. You saw some people, even Trump supporters, even people who had been in Trump's administration or had been associated with him, stepping forward and saying, no, this actually was a very uplifting message, particularly Hispanic surrogates for Donald Trump, people who had been in his camp before, saying this was actually a celebration of Hispanic culture, Puerto Rican culture, and not something that's divisive. I think they may sense that just bashing this and hitting it with a broad brush is not a winning strategy politically.

13:53Yeah, I think that when you look at, if you look at lots of the MAGA accounts on social media, I mean, there are some very vocal ones on X who've been incredibly critical of it. And I think they probably would have been critical of it, of Bad Bunny's performance, no matter what, unless he turned around and said, I actually love Donald Trump and I take back what I said about ice and everything else which he obviously wasn't going to do but I also think that as we pointed out the contrast the slight softening if that's the right word between what he said at the Grammys and then this meant that it has been received by some sort of more conservative influences and certainly those that are Hispanic actually fairly favorably and it's worth pointing out I mean as you were just saying but there are a huge number of people including lots of people who voted for Donald Trump who speak Spanish and And who, you know, there's these stats from 2024.

14:39The government census in the US says that approximately 45 million people who are aged five or older speak Spanish at home, which is about 14 percent of the US population. So going down that narrative of sort of speaking Spanish is not very American. It's kind of alienating. And it's interesting because most of that narrative is happening on X. But on the kind of mass platforms, as we'd call them, like TikTok or Instagram Reels, again, most of what I've seen has been fairly favorable. hasn't been super negative or people just not having an opinion at all. You mentioned ICE, Marianna. Let's go on to another question because we had a question specifically about them.

15:12Is there a chance of a government in 2028, in other words, a Democrat president, this question coming from Chris Wilson, is there a chance that they would disband ICE as their reputation is so tarnished? Do you think they might restart a new agency with a different name? Tricky one, Anthony, isn't it for the Democrats? It is tricky because Democrats had come to the conclusion that calling for the abolition of ICE, abolish ICE, which was a kind of a refrain among the progressive left, Bernie Sanders and the like, in 2020, that campaign, that was a losing issue. That it positioned them as against law enforcement and soft on crime because Trump had done a very effective job of painting immigrant crime as a threat to American public safety.

16:00And so they have been somewhat reluctant to rally around doing away with ICE entirely. And if you listen to Democrats in Congress who have been threatening to defund the Homeland Security Department temporarily unless they get ICE reforms, they're focusing on reforms, things like body cameras and things like requirements for warrants to enter into homes and not just administrative warrants, but one signed by judges, and more oversight of these detention facilities and procedures in place to ensure that people are treated properly. That's not abolishing. That is reforming and improving. And so you do see a certain reluctance, even now, to say we're just going to do away with ICE entirely.

16:47But in reality, the candidate who wins might be the candidate who runs on gutting this agency totally and starting over from the beginning. And when a president, if it's a Democratic president, comes in in 2028, there now is a precedent for using the authority of the chief executive to just cut off funding. Donald Trump did it with a variety of different government agencies, the Department of Education and USAID when he became president last year. So you could see a Democrat doing the same thing, just defunding it, cutting out all this money and letting the enforcement of it drop to practically zero.

17:25Should we hear what Donald Trump himself has been saying? Because he's been talking about those two killings, Alex Priti and Renee Good, both of them killed by immigration agents. Trump was doing his interview with Tom Yamas on NBC last week. After the shooting of Renee Good, you said ICE made some mistakes. What were the mistakes? Well, look, I'm not happy with the two incidents. It's not, you know, it's both of them, not one or the other. He was not an angel and she was not an angel. You know, you look at some tapes from back, but still, I'm not happy with what happened there. Nobody could be happy and ICE wasn't happy either.

18:06But I'm going to always be with our great people of law enforcement. And ICE, police, we have to back them. If we don't back them, we don't have a country. So they're no angels. It kind of a cliched phrase that we heard a lot during the Black Lives Matter movement when they were talking about victims of police brutality not being upstanding citizens. And now Donald Trump is actually using literally saying no angels to refer to the two American citizens who were killed by ICE. I think that is going to be something that is chewed over for the days ahead. But then also defending ICE and defending ICE, as he has in the past, saying that these are people who are going after criminals and trying to keep American streets safe.

18:50Although there was a study by CBS News just released today saying that of the nearly 400 ,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in the past year, only 14 percent of them had any kind of charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses. So Donald Trump may be trying to characterize this as a necessary thing, that these are people, law enforcement, are keeping us safe. But the statistics, at least for now, tell a somewhat different story. The thing is, we've mentioned this before, haven't we, Anthony? There was this phrase, defund the police, that did the Democrats so much damage. And there's no question it did do damage.

19:28It's empirically there. You know, when it's put to polling sessions, as it was down the years now, since it was first invented by some progressive Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialists, etc., run in some cities. And indeed, some people elected on that platform in some cities, but all of it ending, frankly, in tears. Some of them having to go early, some of them being voted out. And a lot of a sense that actually what a lot of core supporters of the Democrats or those they would like to get back on board, particularly poorer Americans running, I don't know, corner shops in poorer parts of the big cities.

20:09The one thing they do not want is disorder, because actually it impacts them more than it does wealthier people. And if you seem to be the remotest bit in favour of disorder, the electorate more broadly will punish you. And so the Democrats have to walk this line between saying we absolutely do not approve of and we'll do everything we can to stop the sort of brutality that leads to people who should not be shot being shot. But at the same time, we very much support the idea that we do have the right to take action against people, including people inside the United States who shouldn't be there.

20:53And I just I think for the Democrats, it's going to be interesting because, you know, it could be, as you say, Anthony, that the next candidate is if it's someone from the left of the party takes a pretty robust line about ICE. But the there'll be plenty in the party who say that's not the thing to do and that actually electorally it could be pretty disastrous. So it's another of those discussions, those sort of internal discussions, isn't it, that the Democrats have to have? Yeah, it's fraught for both sides. Obviously, Democrats have to be careful not to be perceived as anti-law enforcement in general, as you mentioned, anti-police, which I think a lot of Americans still support and to draw the distinction of what ICE is doing.

21:37And then on the other side, Trump and the conservatives not being seen to be the ones who are contributing to this disorder, that you have ice, masked ice agents running around in cities, grabbing people out of their cars and pulling people from their their homes. that feels pretty disordered too, or at least menacing. And that, I think, would make people feel like their safety is threatened, threatened in a different way, but still feel like there's chaos and it's the conservatives and Trump that are contributing to it. So, yeah, it is definitely going to be a potent political issue this year in the midterm elections, and one that is still not absolutely clear which way it's going to break.

22:18OK, on to another topic, which I've actually had a lot of messages about over the past couple of days. And we have had this voice note from Josh in Birmingham. So my question is regarding the recent offensive and demeaning racist posts about the Obamas. Isn't Trump ultimately responsible for any, in quotes, mistakes his staff make? And shouldn't he very publicly condemn the post? Thanks. Okay, so let's rewind and explain what Josh is talking about there. So it's this video and this clip that was shared on Donald Trump's social media profile. And it's set to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight. It's 62 seconds.

23:00And it says various things about voter fraud and in the 2020 election and stuff like that. And specifically, it depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, which it's got kind of AI generated cartoony type figures, political figures. and obviously that caused very serious offence and triggered accusations of racism and then Donald Trump got asked about it and essentially said, oh, it was shared by a member of staff by mistake and this is what he had to say on Air Force One on Friday. So excuse the audio because it's not great. I looked at it, I saw it and I just looked at the first part. It was about voter fraud in someplace, Georgia.

23:39There was a lot of voter fraud, 2020 voter fraud and I didn't see the whole thing. I guess during the end of it, there was some kind of a picture that people don't like. I wouldn't like it either, but I didn't see it. I looked at the first part, and it was really about voter fraud and the machines, how crooked it is, how disgusting it is. Then I gave it to the people. Generally, they look at the whole thing, but I guess somebody didn't. They posted, and we took it down, and we did it. But that was a voter fraud that nobody talks about. but they don't like to talk about that post. We took it down as soon as we found out about it.

24:19Mr. President, a number of Republicans are... So most of the video was about conspiracy theories of voting machines that were tabulating too many votes for Joe Biden and not Donald Trump in the 2020 election. And again, these allegations have been debunked. There's no evidence of it, but it's something that Donald Trump has time and time again touted as evidence that he actually won in 2020. And then at the very end, just the last few seconds was that snippet. And he was catching flack for it, not just from Democrats, but also from many Republicans who said it was racist, that it needed to be taken down and that Donald Trump should have been should have should directly apologize for it, which, as you heard there, he has not done.

25:03I think one thing that's interesting is we've spoken loads about the kinds of posts that get shared on Donald Trump's social media profiles, often that we would consider rage bait, like stuff that is designed to trigger a reaction and outcry. Think of the Gaza Riviera video, ICE, immigration raids videos, all of those things. I think when something like this happens, a lot of people's instinct is to think that it's been done on purpose in order to incite rage. But obviously in this case, actually, you know, people across the political spectrum were very quick to say, hang on a second, this is not all right.

25:33This is racist. Can you take it down? You wonder, I mean, you think that you would watch the whole video through, don't you, Justin? Like to check? Because it's pretty explicit. It is. And, you know, who knows whether he saw it or not. I thought it was quite interesting that he said, I wouldn't like it either. He's not trying to defend it. Some of the stuff, some of the rage bait things that have gone out, Keanu hasn't talked about at all or he's defended, actually. Yeah, he's definitely taken a completely different position on this, which suggests that it genuinely could have been an error. It is interesting that the first response from this White House and Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said in a statement that it was just an Internet meme depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King, saying, please stop with a fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.

26:26So the White House response in the beginning, as this was starting to get some traction, was it's no big deal. Why are you all getting upset about this? And it was one of those rare instances where the outrage grew and it grew from their own side. And the White House had to subsequently blame it on a staff or take it down. And then you were Donald Trump there saying, well, I didn't see it. I mean, if you look at the response on social media, for example, most of the outcry and outrage has either come from politicians themselves and political figures and that sort of thing, or from people who are quite politically engaged.

27:02I imagine a lot of people probably won't have heard about this. And in fact, well, they wouldn't have seen it at the time and have now probably if they've heard about it, it'll be because it got taken down rather than if it had just sort of stayed up. I do think, though, and I think with something like this, when something's very visual and very explicit, I think when I was talking to the guy in Atlanta, what he was saying was, you know, there's a lot of kind of what people would refer to as sort of dog whistle stuff, like kind of racism that's implicit rather than explicit. I think something like this is just offensive.