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This. For Trump's new coalition to work, he needs to keep at least a substantial minority of well-assimilated Hispanics onboard. This should be easy - we are talking about a demographic which are default hostile to negrolatry, left-endorsed sexual deviance, and overeducated stick-up-arse-ness; and strongly in favour of big-arse trucks and other symbols of blue-collar affluence.
"Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" is the worst possible message for this group.
I agree with @Opt-out that this could have ended up with the NFL and the pro-Hispanic left beclowning themselves, particularly if Trump had shut up and let the MSM brag about how Bad Bunny was successfully shoving Spanish-speaking culture down the NFL-watching normies throats. But MAGA doubled down and beclowned themselves even harder - starting immediately after the announcement with various MAGA accounts including Trump poasting about how Bad Bunny (a natural-born US citizen with US citizen ancestors going back a century) was not American. Bad Bunny and the NFL managed to turn down the politics to the point where Trump and Kid Rock look like the people politicising the Super Bowl, not to mention demonstrating the US right's low culture rating by putting on a mediocre alternative show. It helps that (although Bad Bunny has been outspokenly anti-Trump off the stage) the inherent politics of his act is pro-Puerto Rican independence, which has no partisan valence in mainstream America, rather than being generic-left or pro-immigration. To people who understand the difference, it was very obviously a Puerto Rican show and not a generically Hispanic show.
This is actually an open question and likely a fine balancing act. The thing about the various sorts of latinos, is they hate each other as much, and often more than, they hate whites. I went to a significantly latino HS in the burbs and there were multiple cases of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans doing real violence to each other, not just fighting but stabbings and a truck homicide right after I graduated.
Is such a play far too nuanced for anyone to actually make? Likely yes, but the reality is there. Just like the play of latinos against blacks is CLEARLY there, and usually decides elections in Dem primaries in a lot of major northern cities now.
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doesn't' this kind of undercut the whole, he's just as American as everyone else bit from earlier in your post? I think we had a portion of our country declare independence before and I don't quite remember what happened after but I get the impression it wasn't popular amongst the rest of the country.
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Yeah, but nobody ever remembers the halftime show. It doesn’t matter.
I don’t remember ALL the times my dad was an asshole - but he’s an asshole.
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Except the one Janet Jackson did.
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Trump could do the funniest thing by coming out in favor of puerto rican independence
Trump removed support for Puerto Rican statehood from the Republican party platform, which is a step in that direction.
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Well yeah that's how that works. Just because you're an American citizen on paper doesn't mean that you are American. What does it mean to be American? Apple pie and baseball? Free speech and the American flag? Reasonable minds disagree. But Bad Bunny, clearly, feels himself to be operating in some other category, which was the whole point of his show. It's not clear he considers himself American except for rhetorical purposes. That's why when he says "God Bless America" he brings out the flag of every Latin American nation, with Puerto Rico right next to the American flag. Maybe you can redefine "American" then, redefine it to mean whatever you want, but the leftover "USian" category then exists as an object without a name, and we all know what we're talking about. It's not clear Bad Bunny considers himself to be part of that tribe.
In general I think Puerto Rican exists in this "outsider-American" category in a way other latino ethnicities don't. The Cubans in Miami are all pretty red-blooded patriots. Mexicans either wave the Mexican flag or the American. But prominent Puerto Ricans often play this weird rhetorical game where they're not Americans like us, but they're also just as American as us how dare we. If we kicked Puerto Rico out tomorrow and changed their passport names would they still be American?
No but as long as they are part of America they aren't really anything else they've never even been a country. They definitely aren't Anglo and white but they are a regional minority. Are Québécois Canadian? Puerto Ricans are different compared to other Latin American ethnicities because their homeland is part of America.
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Being inclusive of Puerto Ricans, which as a characteristically magnanimous white person I am more than happy to do, should not require excluding me. Since it evidently does mean that in reality, I am now shifted to kicking Puerto Rico out of the United States.
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That's a definitionally anti-American sentiment, so "Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" sounds like an accurate summary and the intended takeaway if your statement is true.
Only if you think America owning Puerto Rico is good for America, which people who want an all-English speaking America presumably don't.
We are in the slightly odd position that Bad Bunny and the people objecting to him agree that Puerto Rico is not America, while the people who booked him, most normie Americans who have thought about the issue, and most normie Puerto Ricans think it is. "Puerto Rico is not America and celebrating Puerto Rican culture is un-American" is a vote-losing message to send, and the NFL and MSM covering the Super Bowl could easily have ended up embarrassing themselves by endorsing it, but MAGA shouted louder and ended up owning said losing message.
You claim that most normie Americans think of PR as American. Do you have any evidence for that claim? I highly doubt it.
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