No. of Recommendations: 18
In the summer of 1936, Adolf Hitler sat in the VIP box of his newly constructed ‘Olympiastadion’ in Berlin, watching the greatest propaganda spectacle the modern world had ever seen. The Games were designed to be a coronation, proof that the Aryan race stood above all others, that Nazi Germany’s social order was not just legitimate but inevitable. Television cameras captured the Olympics for the first time. Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist and film maker, captured every frame for posterity. The torch relay was invented for the occasion. Everything had been choreographed to project power, order, and supremacy.
Then a 22-year-old Black sharecropper’s son from Alabama named Jesse Owens walked onto the track and shattered it all.
Tonight, a 31-year-old Puerto Rican from Vega Baja named Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known to the world as Bad Bunny, will walk onto a different stage at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, and the parallels will be impossible to ignore. He will be the first solo Latino artist to headline the Super Bowl halftime show. He will perform in Spanish. And he will do it as the president of the United States has publicly called his selection “absolutely ridiculous,” declared himself “anti-them,” and announced he will watch a rival “All-American Halftime Show” headlined by Kid Rock instead.
The comparisons between Berlin 1936 and Santa Clara 2026 are not a perfect analogy. No analogy involving Hitler ever is. But the historical parallels between these two cultural collisions deserve serious examination, because they reveal something enduring about how authoritarian movements use mass spectacle to project dominance, how the aesthetic of fascism works and how non-white excellence disrupts that project in ways the architects of power never anticipate.
Hitler (with likely prodding from Goebbels) understood, perhaps before any modern leader, that the Olympic Games could be weaponized as propaganda.
International visitors were to see a prosperous, orderly, welcoming Germany, a nation so physically superior that the rest of the world would have to acknowledge its greatness. Signs reading “Juden Unerwünscht” (“Jews Not Welcome”) were temporarily removed from storefronts. The regime put on a mask of civility for the cameras.
The Super Bowl serves a similar aesthetic function in American life, though we rarely think of it that way. It is not just a football game. It is America’s annual self-portrait, a ritualized celebration of national identity showcased to ourselves and the world that is performed through military flyovers, anthem performances, fireworks shows and the unspoken understanding that everything happening on that field belongs to a specific vision of what this country is.
For decades, the halftime show reinforced that vision with mainstream English-language pop. The Super Bowl was an event where America told itself a
Not because a Latino has never performed at the Super Bowl. Shakira and Jennifer Lopez co-headlined in 2020. But because Bad Bunny will perform almost entirely in Spanish. Because he refused to bring his world tour to the continental United States out of concern that ICE would target his fans. Because at last week’s Grammy Awards, where he became the first artist in history to win Album of the Year for a record sung entirely in Spanish, he opened his acceptance speech with two words that landed like a thunderclap: “ICE out.”
Hitler’s entire Olympic project rested on the myth of Aryan physical supremacy. The Games were supposed to prove, on the world’s largest stage, that white German bodies were simply better. Jesse Owens didn’t just challenge that myth. He annihilated it. Four gold medals — the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the long jump, and the 4x100 relay — each one a repudiation of the ideology that built the stadium he was standing in.
Here is where the parallel sharpens in a way that matters. Hitler predicated his fascist movement on genetic superiority. Trump has predicated his on cultural superiority. These hateful ideologies are not the same but they are kissing cousins.
“Make America Great Again” is, at its core, a self-soothing rallying cry meant to reassure his followers that their culture, their music, their stories, their public art, their language, is the culture that defines American greatness.
It is not a policy platform.
It is a civilizational claim.
It is a twisted worldview that seeks to preserve and elevate “Western Culture” - not to preserve it but to establish it as superior.
This is why Trump didn’t just go after immigration. He went after the Kennedy Center. He installed himself as board chairman, slapped his name on the building next to JFK’s, and drove out the artists who gave it meaning. He declared himself chairman of the board of trustees and promised a new era of a “Golden Age of Arts and Culture” with him alone deciding what that means.
Hamilton canceled. Philip Glass withdrew his Lincoln symphony, saying the center’s new values were in “direct conflict” with the work’s message. The Washington National Opera left entirely.
When the artists refused to perform under his name, Trump announced he would shut the building down for two years. The takeover of the Kennedy Center is not a sideshow. It is the cultural front of the same war. It is an assertion that American art and American excellence flow through him, bear his name, exist at his pleasure.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, with its mass deployment of ICE agents, aggressive raids, and rhetoric casting immigrants as “animals” and “aliens,” rests on the same vision. The assertion that a Spanish-language halftime show is un-American, that Bad Bunny is “not an American artist” despite being a U.S. citizen from a U.S. territory. All of this flows from the same poisoned well that made Hitler believe a Black man couldn’t outrun a white one.
The difference is that Trump’s version of supremacy lives not in the blood but in the culture. And that is precisely why Bad Bunny threatens him so much. A Puerto Rican man singing in Spanish on the biggest cultural stage in America, winning Album of the Year at the Grammys, being the most-streamed artist on the planet while Trump’s Kennedy Center sits empty of talent and soon of audiences entirely.
Bad Bunny is not just a political inconvenience. He is the total repudiation of the cultural superiority that MAGA requires to survive.
And lest anyone doubt the depths of the racial animus driving this political moment, consider what the president of the United States did on the eve of the Super Bowl. On Thursday night, during the first week of Black History Month, Trump posted a video on Truth Social depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, invoking one of the oldest and most dehumanizing racist tropes in American history. The post stayed up for twelve hours before it was deleted. Trump refused to apologize, insisting “I didn’t make a mistake.” Even Senator Tim Scott, one of Trump’s most reliable allies, called it “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.”
This is the man who will be watching Kid Rock tomorrow night instead of Bad Bunny. This is the president whose White House press secretary dismissed the racism as “fake outrage” and told the press to “report on something that actually matters.” The racial hierarchy isn’t subtext anymore. It’s text, posted on the president’s own social media feed with cartoon apes and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” playing in the background.
This is the lie that the spectacle was supposed to protect.
One of the most enduring images in sports history is the story of Hitler refusing to shake Jesse Owens’s hand. The fuller truth is more nuanced: the IOC president told Hitler he must congratulate all gold medalists or none, and Hitler chose none. But the meaning was clear. The leader of the regime could not publicly acknowledge what his own ideology told him was impossible.
Trump’s reaction to Bad Bunny follows a strikingly similar emotional logic. He has called the halftime selection “a terrible choice” that “sows hatred.” He will not attend the game. His White House says he’ll watch Kid Rock instead. The conservative movement has organized an entire counter-programming event, the Turning Point USA “All-American Halftime Show,” headlined by Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, and other performers, built on the explicit premise that Bad Bunny’s performance is foreign and threatening. The very name of the event tells you everything: “All-American,” as if a U.S. citizen performing on U.S. soil somehow isn’t.
Hitler at least had the temerity to show up to the sporting event. Trump will watch from the confines of Mar-a-Lago to save himself the public humiliation.
A sitting president is publicly declaring he will change the channel during the biggest entertainment event on the American calendar because the performer is Puerto Rican and sings in Spanish. The leader of the nation cannot bring himself to watch what his own ideology tells him should not be happening.
Hitler didn’t leave the stadium because he was bored. Trump isn’t skipping the halftime show because he prefers Kid Rock’s music. Both reactions spring from the same instinct: when the spectacle you built to prove your supremacy becomes the stage for its refutation, you look away.
There is another parallel, darker and more urgent, that makes tomorrow night’s performance extraordinary in ways that extend beyond culture war theatrics.
Jesse Owens ran in a Germany that was laying the groundwork for the systematic extermination of millions. The Nuremberg Laws had been enacted a year earlier. Jewish athletes had been expelled from German sports clubs. The violence was accelerating behind the Olympic facade of civility.
Bad Bunny will perform in an America where federal agents have killed American citizens in the streets of Minneapolis in the past month — a mother shot in her car and a VA nurse shot while filming federal operations. The administration initially labeled these Americans as threats and terrorists before the video evidence told a different story. Nationwide protests have erupted. Bruce Springsteen wrote a protest song. The country is reckoning with what it means when the machinery of immigration enforcement turns its violence inward.
When Bad Bunny said “ICE out” at the Grammys, he was not making an abstract political point. He was responding to what is happening in American streets right now.
The most important lesson of the Jesse Owens story is the one we least like to tell. Owens’s four gold medals did not slow the Nazi machine by a single day. They became retroactively meaningful, a story we told ourselves afterward about the power of individual excellence to expose the bankruptcy of racist ideology. But in real time, as historian Peter Fritzsche has noted, the 1936 Olympics were “a great propaganda boost” for Nazi Germany. Germany won the most medals. The regime rolled on. Owens went home to a segregated country where President Roosevelt wouldn’t send him a telegram. “Hitler didn’t snub me,” Owens later said. “It was our president who snubbed me.”
Bad Bunny’s performance carries the same risk and potential. If he delivers an extraordinary show — if he fills Levi’s Stadium with bomba and plena and reggaetón, if he makes 130 million Americans feel the pulse of Puerto Rican music — it will be a cultural milestone. The representation will be real and felt deeply by millions of Latino families watching together.
But it will not stop a single ICE raid.
The danger of the Jesse Owens comparison is that it can lull us into believing cultural moments substitute for political power, that the right performance on the right stage bends the arc of history by itself.
It doesn’t.
Owens’s legacy required a world war, a civil rights movement, and decades of struggle before it was fully honored. The meaning of tomorrow night will be determined not by what happens on the field but by what happens in voting booths, in courtrooms, in the streets where Americans are standing between armed federal agents and their neighbors, and in the long fight over whether this country’s definition of itself will expand or contract.
There is one final parallel, and it’s the cruelest. After his Olympic triumph, Jesse Owens couldn’t find work. He raced against horses for money. He took the freight elevator to his own reception at the Waldorf Astoria because the main elevator was for white guests.
Bad Bunny has already told us this Super Bowl will likely be his only mainland performance this year. Not because he lacks an audience. Because he doesn’t want federal agents arresting his fans in the parking lot.
The most popular artist in the world, a U.S. citizen born on U.S. soil, will take the stage at the biggest event in American entertainment and then go home to Puerto Rico, unwilling to tour the rest of his own country because it is not safe for his people. Two days before the game, the president posted cartoon apes over the faces of the first Black president and first lady, during Black History Month, and refused to apologize.
This evening, that same president will change the channel rather than watch a Puerto Rican man dance on the stage he believes belongs to a different America.
But the game will put the promise of integration on display. And so will the show. The best of America isn’t monochrome. It’s technicolor.
Jesse Owens destroyed the myth of Aryan supremacy on the track in Berlin. Bad Bunny may do the same to the myth of a monolingual, monocultural America on the field in Santa Clara. But whether this becomes Trump’s Jesse Owens moment depends entirely on what the rest of us do after the music stops.
The race is won on the track.
The fight is won everywhere else.
Juntos somos más fuertes.
