Kid Rock was Laughably Bad
Bulwark Takes
The Bulwark
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
JVL, Sarah Longwell, and Adrian Carrasquillo give their takes on the record-breaking Super Bowl halftime show by Bad Bunny. The Puerto Rican superstar delivered a joyful, confident, massively popular performance and MAGA promptly lost its mind. The trio break down why Bad Bunny’s show worked, why Kid Rock’s conservative counter-programming flopped, and what it all says about Trump losing his grip on American culture.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. I'm JVL here with my best friend, Sarah Longwell, and my fairly good equations. |
| 0:07.1 | Adrian Kuroskio from the bulwark. |
| 0:09.2 | Guys, it is post-Super Bowl Monday, and so we have to do Super Bowl halftime discourse. |
| 0:17.9 | This is the world we live in right now. |
| 0:20.2 | Last night, Bad Bunny took to the stage. |
| 0:23.3 | And I have to say, I don't know about you, Sarah. |
| 0:27.3 | How early were you on Bad Bunny? |
| 0:30.9 | I was so early that last night, when he started singing, he was halfway through. |
| 0:36.4 | And I said, does he only sing |
| 0:37.8 | in Spanish? At which point, everyone was like, yeah, that's the whole thing. And I was like, |
| 0:43.8 | oh, I didn't know. Because the first time I ever heard about Bad Bunny was when Trump dissed Puerto Rico |
| 0:50.7 | at Madison Square Garden and Bad Bunny got mad about it. And I was like, |
| 1:00.4 | apparently this is a big deal. I understand that. That's all I know. And so this was the first time actually of me seeing Bad Bunny do his thing. So, Adrian, I'm assuming from your |
| 1:06.3 | shirt that you were quite early to Bad Money. Also, you are younger than Sarah is. You, |
| 1:13.6 | are you a longtime bad bunny fan? Yeah, since 2017. I've been on, I've been on this train. |
| 1:19.7 | I was trying to get people on. I was trying to tell people that he was a huge deal. I have my |
| 1:25.0 | bad money shirt that I got at the residency in Puerto Rico in August. |
| 1:29.0 | So I've been in and I thought he was a really original artist with a lot to say. But as we've |
| 1:35.4 | seen over the last few months, we've seen not just how much he has to say, but like how much he |
| 1:40.0 | has like gotten in the craw of MAGA and trump and everything yeah so i gotta i gotta be honest |
| 1:45.7 | i came to bad bunny about three years ago through wrestling because he did a guest musical spot |
| 1:54.3 | in one of the big pay-per-views and then got worked into the storylines and so he did a like an actual run through WWE. |
... |
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