Bad Bunny performs during the Super Bowl halftime show in Santa Clara, Calif., on Sunday.Frank Franklin II/The Associated Press
Bad Bunny puts on a Super Bowl halftime show that is a direct rebuke to Donald Trump’s culture war against diversity and inclusion. Several athletes at the Milan Cortina Winter Games criticize current affairs in the United States. A senator representing a state that Mr. Trump carried three times is increasingly critical of the President.
This barrage of bad news for the White House follows the rare occasion when Mr. Trump has backed down, as he was forced to do after being accused of racism for distributing a video in which Michelle and Barack Obama were portrayed as apes.
Presidents go through bad patches. Franklin Roosevelt suffered an embarrassing defeat when his 1937 plan to pack the Supreme Court died in a Senate committee. Lyndon Johnson was heartbroken when American cities were aflame after he had done so much to battle urban problems, including racism. John F. Kennedy was mortified by the 1961 fiasco at the Bay of Pigs, when an effort to overthrow Fidel Castro ended in ignominy.
These setbacks – like the torment Richard Nixon suffered as the Watergate scandal crashed around him and the agony Bill Clinton experienced during his 1998 impeachment – are an unavoidable element of the U.S. presidency.
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Mr. Trump is experiencing yet another bad patch. He has powered through bad days and bad months. He was indicted four times in four jurisdictions in the year 2023 alone. Aside from his election triumph in 2024, he suffered through a brutal nomination fight with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and then was the target of two assassination attempts.
Nevertheless, he persisted, to adapt a phrase from his sometime consigliere and sometime critic Mitch McConnell, a Republican senator who employed it to attempt to silence Elizabeth Warren when the Massachusetts Democrat refused to cease speaking during a 2017 debate in the Senator chamber. Mr. Trump is the panjandrum of persistence.
Indeed, Mr. Trump has survived in large measure because he prides himself on having learned the dark lessons of his mentor Roy Cohn, who mastered the shady art of politics in the McCarthy era: Deny, deny. Attack, attack. Take the offensive. Never apologize. Use fear as a weapon.
That fear nudged Senator Thom Tillis out of a re-election bid. But it freed the North Carolina Republican to issue a series of brutal criticisms of the administration. Mr. Trump responded by describing Mr. Tillis, who voted to support all of the most controversial Trump cabinet appointments, as a “terrible senator” and a “loser.”
Several U.S. athletes at the Olympics have also been bitterly critical of their government.
“The Olympics represent peace, so let’s not only bring world peace but domestic peace within our country,” said Alex Ferreira, a halfpipe skier. Svea Irving, a freestyle skier, said it was “definitely a tough time in our country right now,” adding, “I just continue to represent my values, [which are] compassion and love and respect for others.” Figure skater Amber Glenn said the LGBTQ community is experiencing “hard times” under Mr. Trump.
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After freestyle skier Hunter Hess said that “it brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now,” Mr. Trump called Mr. Hess “a real Loser,” saying, “If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it. Very hard to root for someone like this.”
But it was that Bad Bunny halftime show that really drew the ire of the President.
In a posting on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said “the dancing is disgusting” and called the performance “an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence.”
Then he went on to say that “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Bad Bunny’s lyrics were in Spanish, a language spoken at home by one in seven Americans, making the U.S. second only to Mexico in the number of Spanish speakers.
As Bad Bunny – a native of Puerto Rico, which has been a U.S. territory since 1898 and whose residents have been American citizens since 1917 – was proceeding with his celebration of American diversity, Mr. Trump sent out a message to his supporters: “I know you’ve always had my back, and I know with your support at this very moment, WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
That base of support has sustained Mr. Trump even as 55 per cent of Americans say they disapprove of his performance, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll.
Mr. Trump is a lame-duck president with no fear of personal repudiation at the ballot box, which partly explains why he has not altered his political style despite the many challenges he has faced. And while presidents are often restrained or moderated by their party, Mr. Trump so controls the modern GOP that there are no moderating elements inside the Republican Party.
“This is not a normal administration,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a presidential scholar at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me. “Ordinarily presidents react to setbacks and change. Instead, President Trump doubles down and calls his critics ‘losers.’ And there are no forces within the administration or Congress to pull him back.”