General Discussion

The most glaring recent example of the moment is the MAGA-wide tantrum over Bad Bunny headlining the Super Bowl’s halftime show. Due to a combination of incuriosity and racist hostility to the reggaeton star’s music, which he performs mostly in Spanish, most right-wingers don’t like Bad Bunny and have no interest in learning why others do. This would be fine — if they could have a healthy reaction to other people having different tastes, which is to shrug and say “not for me.” Instead, the right-wing propaganda machine whipped the MAGA coalition into an outrage, insisting that they are owed a pop culture that always favors their blinkered tastes, even though they’re often cringeworthy or, at best, decades out of date, as evidenced by the washed-up Kid Rock headlining Turning Point USA’s “alternative” halftime show.

MAGA’s backlash against Bad Bunny is just the most recent in an endless parade of right-wing freak-outs that stretch back over decades involving the perceived insult of most people having better, more modern or more interesting tastes. Nearly every time a non-white person headlines the Super Bowl halftime show, we get a version of this whining. We witnessed rage about Taylor Swift and the “Barbie” movie. On Sunday night, some MAGA influencers clearly watched the Grammys only so they could feel victimized by the proceedings. The anger is as boring and predictable as the music that evangelical Christian families offer their kids as weak substitutes for real pop tunes.

Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center symbolizes the end game of this endless, pointless grievance: A hope that MAGA can take by force the cultural popularity that will never be offered freely. After his election in 2024, there was a short period of elation on the right as initial reports suggested movie and TV studios would be shuttering projects with racially diverse casts and CBS announced that liberal comedian Stephen Colbert’s late-night show was being canceled. Promises of more conservative-friendly programming were made. We also saw this in the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing, when MAGA tried to browbeat the public into pretending to like Kirk, with threats of doxxing and firing for people who refused to play along.

But you cannot bully people into liking you. That was demonstrated after Jimmy Kimmel nearly got fired by ABC from his late-night show for a relatively mild joke about the right’s reaction to Kirk’s fatal shooting. Audience outrage led Disney to swiftly reinstate Kimmel, and it’s no wonder. Late-night ratings are already down as fewer people watch live TV. If ABC had tried to replace a genuinely funny comedian with a right-wing hack, no one would have watched at all. Turns out that forcing ordinary Americans to give up decent entertainment for some MAGA knock-off is much harder than most Trumpists thought.