Trump Rages at Bad Bunny—and Accidentally Exposes a Big MAGA Weakness

A broad-based anti-ICE movement has spontaneously evolved. Countless ordinary people are now recording ICE with phones as an act of defiance in and of itself. Trump officials are trying to scale up enormous deportation prison camps—but when locations have become public, local populations have quickly organized, sometimes shaming warehouse owners out of selling to ICE.

When press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently lashed out at Bad Bunny for condemning ICE, she ripped into “celebrities who live in gated communities” for “trying to demonize law enforcement,” even mouthing the usual nonsense about “Hollywood and the elitist crowd.” In doing this, she tried to entangle the battle over ICE in time-tested cultural tropes.

But ICE’s paramilitary war on Americans has broken all those old culture-war signifiers. Most Americans no longer see ICE as hallowed “law enforcement,” because that fundamentally isn’t what ICE is practicing. Working-class voters oppose ICE and mass deportations. And an emblem of anti-ICE, pro-immigrant America is doing the halftime show at the Super Bowl. “Bad Bunny is a symbol of cultural diversity,” Zirin, the sports and politics journalist, told me. “If the NFL, many of whose owners bankroll Trump, see Bad Bunny as good for business, that’s very bad for the regime.”