First Draft: 🏈 Bad Trump, Good Bunny
It’s not just the Super Bowl. MAGA’s culture war is epically backfiring. And as a blue wave builds, Trump is only escalating his crackdowns.
On this day in 2021, the US Senate began the impeachment trial against then former President Donald Trump…only to end up acquitting him and giving rise to yet another Trump presidency, even after inciting an insurrection. Gotta love accountability in government!
Happy Monday. It’s Swin, again, and I – like some of you reading ‘First Draft’ this morning – am busy working off my Super Bowl hangover. We’ll have more to say on the big game in a moment, but first, I want to alert you all to a three-word term that political operatives kept blowing up my phone with this weekend: “The Epstein Class.”
Senator Jon Ossoff used it in a Saturday speech – during which he compared Donald Trump to a klansman – to describe the ruling party and its ultra-wealthy enablers. (Rep. Ro Khanna has previously used the term.) Several longtime Dem operatives messaged me how much they wanted their party to discover message discipline and relentlessly brand President Trump and the GOP “The Epstein Class.” Seasoned Republican consultants tried to convince me, for instance, that it was too “cute” to resonate. We’ll see how much it catches on between now and November, and which party dominates in the midterms!
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Trump’s culture war backfires, a blue wave builds, and the UK’s Keir Starmer faces pressure over an Epstein scandal, while Howard Lutnick gets a pass despite making repeated appearances in the Epstein files.
Trump Loses the Super Bowl – and His Culture War
In recent days, you may have seen viral clips of an adult man in Texas attacking a minor during a student walkout protest against Donald Trump’s ICE. Video from the scene appears to show a furious man – whose car apparently got kicked by a teen – starting to savagely beat a young girl, only to have a swarm of teens and students get him off the girl and fight him until he flees, looking exactly as dignified as you might imagine a grown-ass man might look in this situation. It was a local story in the Lone Star State, but it was also the perfect national metaphor.
The president of the United States is That Guy – except instead of getting beaten up by a bunch of small kids who he tried to fight, Donald Trump is getting his ass handed to him by the very culture wars he so confidently started. And last night’s big game underscored precisely why.
Trump didn’t show up at Super Bowl LX in California, in part because his White House had determined that if he did, he would get booed so very lustily on live TV, in front of tens of millions of viewers. But his flailing, increasingly unpopular presidency still managed to loom large over Sunday’s events. The two main musical acts – Bad Bunny and Green Day – are both avowedly against Trump and his ethnic-cleansing campaigns. Green Day performed “American Idiot,” which they routinely play to protest Trump’s “MAGA agenda.” Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny’s halftime show was a cinematic, Spanish-language celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity in America. During the show, he prominently displayed the message, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” which is almost verbatim what he said at his recent Grammys “ICE out” speech.
If anyone wants to argue Bad Bunny avoided partisan politics during the Super Bowl, he sort of did – on paper, with the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability. His message couldn’t have been clearer, and it joyfully spat in the face of what Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and the rest of the gang running the federal government stand for. But if the NFL wants to pretend its halftime show didn’t have an inherently anti-Trump message to it, the Trump administration is already showing it’s not willing to give them a pass.