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Donald Trump’s success in getting a wide range of Americans to vote Republican, including the Hispanic community, was key to his victory in the 2024 presidential election.
Now in 2026, Trump’s distaste for Bad Bunny, an American citizen from Puerto Rico, at the Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime performance suggests that scoring points with Hispanic voters is no longer a high priority for the president.
“No one understands a word this guy is saying and the dancing is disgusting,” Trump said Sunday on the social network. He called halftime show”an insult to America’s greatness.”
Polls show Trump has been losing support from Latinos in recent months, and observers say his response to the midterms will not help his Republican Party stem the bleeding ahead of key debates.
Clarissa Martinez, vice president of UnidosUS, the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, questioned Trump’s decision to destroy Bad Bunny’s performance, which was watched by an audience nearly equal to the number of Americans who voted in the last presidential election.
“It’s really not a good political move,” Martinez said in an interview with CBC News.
Andrew Chang explains why US President Donald Trump criticized Bad Bunny’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl and how it fits into a larger pattern. Images courtesy of The Canadian Press, Reuters and Getty Images
“Not only was (the halftime show) a missed opportunity for the president, but he made himself worse with his response to it,” Martinez said.
Martinez says Trump’s disparagement of Bad Bunny dismissed the fact that the performer is American and reaffirmed the current concern of many Hispanic Americans that their citizenship is in question amid months of immigration and customs crackdowns across the country.
‘They’re toast tonight’
Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who co-founded an anti-Trump political action committee called the Lincoln Project, pointed to Trump’s post and similar reactions from others in his MAGA movement on Sunday as evidence that the Republican Party is “going to lose so much” in the midterms.
“Republicans still don’t realize that their only slim chance to hold onto Congress in November is to stop the collapse of Hispanic males under thirty. Tonight shows they’re done,” Madrid wrote on X.
Prominent MAGA stalwarts who joined the social media chorus of disapproval included:
- Megyn Kelly: “I like my English halftime shows from (people) who love America.”
- Laura Loomer: “Totally disgraceful. There is nothing American about all this.”
- Nick Adams: “Someone needs to tell Bad Bunny he’s in America. This is an abomination.”
Trump’s gains in Hispanic communities have been one of the surprises of the 2024 election. The Republican nominee was chosen by 48 percent of Hispanic voters, just three percentage points behind his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and a 12 percentage point jump over his 2020 total. data collected by Pew Research Center.
That support came not only despite Trump’s promise to crack down on illegal immigration, but in part because of it, according to Martinez.
“Hispanic voters want to see a functioning immigration system, and there was a lot of concern about the chaos that many people saw at the border under the previous (Biden) administration, regardless of whether the administration was solely responsible,” she said.
Many Latin Americans supported Trump on immigration
“The Republicans and President Trump orchestrated a very intense campaign on that issue, and that was one of the issues where they actually outspent the Democrats among Hispanic voters,” Martinez said.
That policy helped Trump carry border districts with a large Hispanic population that has long favored Democrats, just as his campaign’s focus on combating the rising cost of living helped boost his appeal to working-class Hispanic voters across the country.
US political observers also point out that Hispanic voters are by no means a monolith, with strong and long-standing support for the Republican Party among, for example, Hispanic social conservatives and anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
But there is now evidence that the Trump administration’s heavy-handed crackdown on cross-border immigration, as well as its failure to rein in prices, is hurting Republicans among Hispanic voters.
AND poll conducted by the Economist/YouGov in January, just after the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, only 28 percent of Hispanic respondents approved of the way Trump is doing his job as president, down from 41 percent last February.
The survey, conducted via online interviews, included 231 Hispanic citizens as part of a larger survey of 1,602 American adults.
Another bigger one poll of 3,000 Hispanic registered voters nationwide found that 64 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, compared to 31 percent who said they strongly or somewhat approve.
That poll was conducted in October 2025, leaving open the possibility that views have changed since then, given the administration’s focus on the Operation Metro Surge immigration crackdown in Minnesota and the killing of two American citizens by federal agents.
Among those who told pollsters they voted for Trump in the 2024 election, 13 percent said they would not do so if they had the chance to vote again.
Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny was the big winner of this year’s Grammy Awards and used the opportunity to speak out against the immigration policy of US President Donald Trump.
The poll also found that 52 percent of respondents plan to vote Democratic in the 2026 congressional primaries, while 28 percent said they plan to vote Republican.
While the survey suggests economic issues such as inflation and jobs are top concerns for Hispanic voters, immigration policy and presidential gaffes are also noted as important.
The October poll, conducted by BSP Research and Shaw & Co. Research for UnidosUS, used a hybrid methodology in which respondents were reached through a combination of live telephone interviews, text message invitations and online panels, with interviews conducted in English and Spanish.
Monica Villalobos, president and CEO of the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, says she believes the Trump administration’s performance over the past year will result in a major shift in the way the community votes.
Chamber members “feel betrayed by this administration, given its overreaching,” Villalobos he told Politico last month.
