The President Is Not Going to the Super Bowl, and the Jumbotron Wins Again

A tale of two halftime shows, and one very fragile relationship with applause.

America has traditions: fireworks, office birthdays, and one winter Sunday when we collectively decide football is religion and nachos are a sacrament. Last year, Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl in person. This year, he’s skipping Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, because it’s “just too far away,” and because he’s “anti” Bad Bunny and Green Day.

Super Bowl LX kicks off at 6:30 p.m. Eastern at Levi’s Stadium. The New England Patriots play the Seattle Seahawks. And Trump, asked why he won’t be there, has offered the sort of explanation normally reserved for a flaky friend bailing on brunch: distance, and vibes.

First, the distance. “Too far away” is a hilariously normal-person complaint for a man who treats airplanes like props. This is a president who has never met a camera angle he didn’t believe was a constitutional right. Yet suddenly, California is an unreasonable ask, as if Air Force One has been swapped for a rental Corolla with a check-engine light.

It’s also the rare Trump excuse that accidentally contains a poetic truth. Santa Clara isn’t just far in miles; it’s far in atmosphere. New Orleans Super Bowl Trump was a controlled set piece: the kind of environment where everyone gets briefed, the optics are managed, and the president can report back that he received “great” handshakes, “they like me,” he has claimed, as if friendship is measured in palm contact and applause decibels. Santa Clara is California, which in Trump-language is basically a foreign country with better produce and worse applause.

Second, the entertainment. Trump reportedly called the performers, Bad Bunny headlining halftime, with Green Day in the festivities, a “terrible choice,” saying, “I’m anti-them… All it does is sow hatred.” There are few pleasures purer than watching a political arsonist lecture the public about fire safety. Also: “I’m anti-them” is not an opinion so much as a brand posture, like a human yard sign that learned to talk.

You can picture the statement arriving five seconds before the man: Trump’s head, enormous and glossy, rolling into the conversation like it pays rent. The head declares itself “anti” a Puerto Rican global superstar and a band whose whole aesthetic is “loud disagreement,” then nods with the solemnity of someone who has just signed a treaty with his own reflection.

But don’t worry, Turning Point USA, never one to miss a chance to cosplay as the nation’s beleaguered moral lifeguard, is staging its own “All-American Halftime Show” for anyone who finds Bad Bunny too spicy and Green Day too… literate. It’s the media equivalent of leaving a party because the DJ played something with a beat, then throwing your own in the garage with fluorescent lighting and a playlist titled PATRIOTIC VIBES (NO FEELINGS). Kid Rock and a few country acts will provide the “family-friendly, values-driven” alternative, so if you’re a Trump supporter worried the Super Bowl might accidentally expose you to democracy, protest, or the radical concept of other people existing, relax: you can switch over to the safe space where the flags are oversized, the grievances are pre-heated, and democracy is muted during the chorus.

But The Independent’s more interesting suggestion is that the real reason isn’t mileage or music. According to a report it cites, aides and advisers “quietly determined” there was a strong chance Trump would get booed, “big league,” and they worried about the inevitable viral clips. It’s hard to think of a better summary of modern power: the commander in chief has been grounded by the threat of a 12-second jumbotron video and a caption in all caps.

Booing isn’t just disapproval anymore; it’s content. It’s a sound bite that becomes a meme, then a trend, then a short-lived national referendum conducted by strangers with ring lights. The fear isn’t humiliation so much as loss of narrative control, one of the few things Trump cannot tolerate, because his entire political metabolism runs on being the loudest signal in the room. And the room, in this case, is a stadium: a democratic canyon full of foam fingers. You don’t control it. You appear, the crowd reacts, and the internet does the rest.

The background here is darker than the jokes. The Independent frames the Super Bowl amid mass protests against the administration’s anti-immigration crackdown, noting the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during federal immigration operations. The country is boiling, and the president is making a national-symbol decision about whether to attend a football game based on the halftime headliner and the possibility of getting booed. If you ever wanted a snapshot of politics collapsing into entertainment, here it is.

Bad Bunny, for his part, isn’t just a performer in this story; he’s a culture-war Rorschach test. The article notes he used his Grammys moment to say “ICE out,” which immediately became the kind of phrase a press office hears in its nightmares. Meanwhile, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has said officers would be “all over” the Super Bowl, fueling enforcement fears, while the NFL’s chief security officer, Cathy Lanier, has publicly insisted there are no planned ICE operations tied to the game or its related events.

Naturally, the White House insists Trump would have been “warmly welcomed,” because America knows he has done “more to help this country than any other president in history.” This is Trump-world theology in one sentence: maximal, self-sealing, and so inflated it could float over Levi’s Stadium on its own.