Good for Bad Bunny.

After the Puerto Rican superstar rocked the halftime show at the Super Bowl, Donald Trump derided his performance as “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” Bad Bunny, he thundered, “is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence.”

Trump has it exactly, egregiously, wrong. Bad Bunny – Spotify’s top global artist of 2025 with nearly 20 billion streams – represents an affirmation of America’s greatness, not an affront. His energy and enterprise exemplify the excellence that diverse cultures have always contributed to America.

But diversity does not have to lead to division. At our best as a nation, those strands of difference are woven together into a larger pattern, a common identity. Bad Bunny captured that ideal when he ended his show by spiking a football painted “Together, We Are America,” as a message on a giant billboard read: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

Trump has always embraced a very different message and followed a very different strategy. He divides the nation along a fault line – pried open by race, class and gender-based grievances – that creates a small majority in his favor. And that strategy has worked. Twice.

One reason for that success has been his shrewd marriage of politics with culture, cultivating connections with influencers like the Paul brothers and the Nelk Boys, who could reach and mobilize disinterested voters, many of them young men. He used them to spread his familiar argument: that his opponents were for “others,” for “they/them,” and represented an “affront” to American values and identity.

After Bad Bunny’s performance was announced, the pro-Trump organization Turning Point USA took a play right out of the old master’s playbook, promoting a counter-performance they labeled the All-American Halftime Show. They could not be more explicit about their strategy, proclaiming on their website, “We’re taking the American Culture War to the MAIN STAGE. No ‘woke’ garbage. Just TRUTH. Just FREEDOM. Just AMERICA.”

The performers were mainly white male country singers, invoking the familiar Trumpian tropes of nostalgia and grievance. Brantley Gilbert pondered past glories (while covering a Jason Aldean song): “Smoke rollin’ out the window / An ice cold beer sittin’ in the console / Memory lane up in the headlights / It’s got me reminiscin’ on them good times.” Lee Brice complained: “It ain’t easy being country / in this country nowadays / the directions, the finger pointing / when everything goes up in flames.”

So if this was “the American Culture War,” who won? Even some Trump loyalists were unhappy. One of the Paul brothers, Jake – who lives in Puerto Rico – followed the party line and proclaimed, “Turn off this halftime. A fake American citizen performing who publicly hates America. I cannot support that.”

But the other brother, Logan, broke ranks. “I love my brother but I don’t agree with this,” he posted. “Puerto Ricans are Americans & I’m happy they were given the opportunity to showcase the talent that comes from the island.”

Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who studies Latino voting behavior, told The Hill that Trump was picking the wrong fight with Bad Bunny: “If the Republicans don’t stop the hemorrhaging with young, male Latinos ... they’re cooked. This shows that they’re not even aware of the size of the problem that they have.”

At times, Bad Bunny has been explicit in condemning Trump’s immigration policies. At the Grammy awards, where he won Album of the Year, he started his acceptance speech by saying, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say, ‘ICE out.’ We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”

But his performance at the Super Bowl was both more subtle and more effective. In this all-digital, all-streaming, all-the-time world, Bad Bunny is the future. The performers at the “All-American” show not only sang about the past – they embodied the past.

“Bad Bunny’s performance isn’t just the story of the ascendancy of a single performer, or of one genre, or even of Latin music more broadly,” wrote the cultural critic Noah Shachtman in The New York Times. “It’s the sign of something bigger still. America’s pop culture today is multilingual, polycultural and international at its very core.”

“Fans are connecting with music from all over the world, in different languages, because it feels authentic to how global our lives already are,” added the bilingual vocalist Becky G. “For a lot of people, it feels overdue, not controversial. It’s representation catching up to reality.”

So who won this round of the culture wars? Bad Bunny – by a knockout.

• Steven V. Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be reached at stevecokie@gmail.com.