Super Bowl exposes 'big MAGA weakness' as Trump sees pushback in unlikely space: columnist
The Super Bowl is exposing a major MAGA weakness, a columnist argued.
Greg Sargent wrote an article Sunday called, "Trump Rages at Bad Bunny—and Accidentally Exposes a Big MAGA Weakness," in which he argues, "MAGA’s hatred of the Super Bowl halftime performer reflects a hubris about what parts of the culture are 'theirs.' But those assumptions are proving more wrong every day."
Sargent referenced Trump calling Bad Bunny a "terrible choice," noting, "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."
He continued:
"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... 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."
ICE going off the rails showed Trump he was wrong, according to Sargent.
"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," the article states. "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."
He added, "Yet large swaths of the culture—including typically MAGA-friendly ones—have now turned against all of this at a deep level."