Analysis of: Trump claims Bad Bunny’s historic Super Bowl show watched by millions was ‘affront’ to American ‘greatness’ – US politics live
The Guardian | February 9, 2026
TL;DR
Trump attacks Bad Bunny's Spanish-language Super Bowl show as un-American while ICE terrorizes immigrant communities—revealing culture wars as cover for intensifying class violence against racialized workers.
Analytical Focus:Class Analysis Contradictions Historical Context
This live blog captures a revealing moment where cultural spectacle and state violence intersect. Trump's attack on Bad Bunny's historic Spanish-language Super Bowl performance—calling it an 'affront to the Greatness of America'—functions as ideological theater while buried in the same news cycle are the material facts: ICE has arrested nearly 400,000 immigrants in one year, with under 14% having any violent criminal record. The cultural outrage manufactures consent for what is essentially a disciplinary campaign against racialized sections of the working class. The class dynamics here are stark. Bad Bunny represents not just Puerto Rican culture but specifically working-class Latino identity ascending to the pinnacle of American mass entertainment. Trump's visceral reaction—claiming 'nobody understands a word this guy is saying'—reveals anxieties about who belongs within the imagined national community that capital constructs. Meanwhile, ICE operations in Maine target immigrant workers essential to industries like seafood processing, with labor unions describing conditions of 'occupation.' The state apparatus serves to maintain a vulnerable, deportable workforce that depresses wages and undermines labor organizing. The contradictions are multiple and sharpening. The Super Bowl itself—capitalism's greatest spectacle of consumption and nationalism—featured an artist explicitly celebrating pan-American solidarity and critiquing the very administration watching. Trump's response inadvertently highlighted his isolation: celebrities across genres praised the performance as 'unifying,' while his complaints about Spanish being spoken revealed the limits of MAGA cultural hegemony. Most significantly, the article notes Maine's Senator Collins faces electoral consequences from ICE raids, suggesting the immigration crackdown may threaten Republican Senate control. Capital requires immigrant labor even as the political right mobilizes nativist sentiment—a contradiction that cannot hold indefinitely.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Immigrant workers (Venezuelan, Latino communities), State enforcement apparatus (ICE, DHS), Cultural workers and entertainers (Bad Bunny, supporting artists), Labor unions (Maine AFL-CIO), Political representatives (Trump, Collins), Energy capitalists (Chris Wright, oil interests), Protesters and demonstrators
Beneficiaries: Capital interests requiring disciplined, vulnerable immigrant labor, Political forces mobilizing nativist sentiment for electoral gain, Oil companies seeking Venezuelan resources, Private detention facilities
Harmed Parties: Immigrant workers facing detention and deportation, Communities of color under surveillance ('occupation'), Workers whose organizing power is undermined by deportation threats, Protesters facing federal conspiracy charges, Families separated by enforcement actions
The state apparatus functions as disciplinary mechanism over racialized labor, maintaining a tiered workforce where immigration status determines worker vulnerability. The prosecution of protesters—with a career DOJ attorney resigning rather than sign indictments—demonstrates the criminalization of solidarity. Cultural figures like Bad Bunny occupy a contradictory position: elevated by capital's entertainment machinery while using that platform to critique state violence, forcing ideological contestation within the superstructure.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: Immigrant labor essential to industries (Maine seafood, agriculture, services), Super Bowl as $500+ billion entertainment-advertising complex, Venezuelan oil reserves as target of US energy policy, Detention as profitable industry, Labor market segmentation based on legal status
Immigration enforcement functions to produce a stratified labor force. Workers with precarious status accept worse conditions and lower wages, undermining collective bargaining power across the working class. The Maine AFL-CIO's description of 'occupation' reveals how enforcement transforms entire communities into zones of labor discipline. Meanwhile, the Venezuela segment exposes naked resource extraction ambitions—'improving management' of PDVSA means subordinating it to international (US) capital.
Resources at Stake: Venezuelan oil reserves, Cheap, disciplined immigrant labor power, Cultural hegemony over American national identity, Electoral control of Senate, First Amendment rights and protest capacity
Historical Context
Precedents: Bracero Program and cyclical immigration policy tied to labor needs, Palmer Raids and Red Scares criminalizing immigrant radicalism, Operation Wetback (1954) mass deportation campaign, Post-9/11 expansion of deportation infrastructure, Historical exclusion of Spanish from 'legitimate' American culture
This represents an intensification of neoliberal-era immigration policy, which since the 1980s has combined border militarization with tolerance of undocumented labor—creating maximum worker vulnerability. The current phase escalates enforcement spectacle while capital continues requiring immigrant labor, producing the contradiction visible in Maine where ICE raids threaten Republican electoral fortunes. The cultural dimension follows patterns of nativist backlash during periods of demographic shift and economic anxiety, redirecting working-class anger away from capital toward racialized scapegoats.
Contradictions
Primary: Capital's simultaneous dependence on immigrant labor and political mobilization of anti-immigrant sentiment—the system requires the workers it demonizes
Secondary: Superstructural contradiction: capitalism's greatest spectacle platform amplifies anti-system cultural expression, Electoral contradiction: immigration crackdown threatens Republican Senate control in affected states, Legal contradiction: career prosecutors resign rather than criminalize First Amendment activity, National contradiction: Puerto Ricans are US citizens yet treated as foreign/other
These contradictions point toward potential ruptures. The Maine situation suggests immigration enforcement may face limits where it damages capital's labor supply or electoral interests. The cultural contestation—Bad Bunny's platform versus Trump's reaction—indicates ideological hegemony is contested terrain. The prosecution of protesters and resignation of DOJ attorneys signals deepening conflict between democratic norms and authoritarian tendencies. Resolution likely depends on whether labor organizations can build solidarity across citizen/immigrant divides, transforming immigration from wedge issue into class question.
Global Interconnections
The Venezuela segment reveals how immigration policy connects to imperialist resource extraction. The same administration detaining Venezuelan asylum seekers plans to restructure Venezuela's oil industry for US corporate access. This demonstrates how the global movement of people—refugees, migrants, asylum seekers—cannot be separated from the movement of capital seeking resources and markets. Workers displaced by economic crises often engineered through sanctions and structural adjustment become the 'illegal' labor force disciplined by enforcement. The cultural dimension has global resonance: Bad Bunny's pan-American solidarity—naming countries from Uruguay to Canada—challenges the nationalist framework that pits workers against each other. The Super Bowl's international audience of 60+ million saw an alternative vision of 'America' as hemispheric rather than US-exclusive. This ideological contestation occurs on terrain shaped by decades of US intervention throughout Latin America, creating the very conditions of displacement that produce immigration.
Conclusion
This juxtaposition of cultural spectacle and state violence reveals both the mechanisms of capitalist rule and their vulnerabilities. Trump's impotent rage at a Spanish-language performance reaching 130 million viewers demonstrates the limits of ideological control, while ICE's community terror shows the material violence underlying culture war rhetoric. The key strategic question is whether the solidarity expressed symbolically—by protesters blocking ICE vehicles, by artists celebrating Latino heritage, by labor unions naming enforcement as 'occupation'—can translate into organized working-class power that refuses the division between citizen and immigrant workers. The resignations of career prosecutors, the electoral anxieties of Republican senators, and the mass audience for counter-hegemonic cultural expression all suggest cracks in the edifice. Class-conscious organizing must exploit these contradictions, building the kind of solidarity that transforms immigration from a wedge issue into recognition of shared interests against capital and its enforcement apparatus.
Suggested Reading
- The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1961) Fanon's analysis of colonial violence, national culture, and the psychology of oppression illuminates how racialized state violence and cultural resistance intersect in the struggle for dignity and liberation.
- Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti (1997) Parenti's examination of fascist movements and their relationship to capitalist crisis helps contextualize how nativist authoritarianism emerges and mobilizes during periods of systemic instability.
- Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis (1981) Davis's analysis of how race has historically been used to divide the working class provides essential framework for understanding immigration as a tool of labor discipline and class fragmentation.