Republicans are already losing Latino support. Then Trump went after Bad Bunny
Donald Trump’s success in attracting large numbers of Americans to vote for Republicans, including the Latino community, was key to his victory in the 2024 presidential election.
Now in 2026, Trump’s outrage at the all-Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime performance by Bad Bunny — an American citizen from Puerto Rico — suggests that scoring with Latino voters is no longer the president’s top priority.
“Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting,” Trump said on social media on Sunday. He called small time show”a disgrace to the Greatness of America.”
Polls suggest Trump has been losing Latino support in recent months, and observers say his response to the short-term showdown will do little to help his Republican Party stem the bleeding before key moments.
Clarissa Martinez, vice president of UnidosUS, the largest Latino civil rights and national advocacy organization, questions Trump’s decision to cancel Bad Bunny’s performance, which was watched by an audience roughly equal to the number of Americans who voted in the last presidential election.
“It’s not a good political move,” Martinez told CBC News in an interview.
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. Photos provided by The Canadian Press, Reuters and Getty Images
“That’s not all [the halftime show] missing an opportunity for the president, he made himself worse by his response to it,” said Martinez.
Martinez says Trump’s disparagement of Bad Bunny denied the actor is American and reaffirmed current concerns among many US Hispanics that their citizenship is being questioned amid months of immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps across the country.
‘Tonight it shows that they are frying’
Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who founded an anti-Trump political committee called the Lincoln Project, pointed to Trump’s position and the similar reaction of others at his MAGA organization on Sunday as evidence that the Republican Party will “lose a lot” in the midterms.
“Republicans still don’t realize their slim chance to hold on to Congress in November is to stop the fall of Latino men under thirty. Tonight shows they’re fried,” wrote Madrid in X.
MAGA loyalists who have joined the social media group of disapproval include:
- Megyn Kelly: “I love my small time shows in English since [people] who love America.”
- Laura Loomer: “Absolutely disgusting. There is nothing American about any of this.”
- Nick Adams: “Someone needs to tell Bad Bunny he’s in America. This is disgusting.”
Trump’s gains in Latino communities were one of the surprises of the 2024 election. The Republican candidate was favored by 48 percent of Hispanic voters, just three percentage points behind Democrat Kamala Harris and a 12 percentage point jump from her 2020 total, according to data compiled by the 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.
“Spanish voters want to see an effective immigration system, and there was a lot of concern about the chaos many people were seeing at the previous border. [Biden] administration, even if the administration was only responsible,” he said.
Many Latinos support Trump on immigration
“The Republicans and President Trump ran a very intense campaign on this issue, and that was one of the issues where they actually beat the Democrats among Hispanic voters,” Martinez said.
That policy helped Trump carry heavily Hispanic border districts that had long leaned toward Democrats, even as his campaign’s focus on fighting the cost of living helped boost his appeal to working-class Latino voters across the country.
Political observers in the US also point out that the Latino electorate is by no means homogeneous, with strong and long-term support for the Republican Party among, for example, Hispanic social conservatives and anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
But now there is evidence that the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies away from the border, and their failure to restore tariffs, are hurting Republicans among Hispanic voters.
An Economist/YouGov poll conducted in January shortly after the Renee Good shooting in Minneapolis found that 28 percent of Hispanic respondents approved of Trump’s handling of his job as president, up from 41 percent in February of last year.
The study, conducted by web-based interviews, involved 231 Hispanic residents as part of a larger poll of 1,602 American adults.
Another larger survey of 3,000 registered Latino voters nationally found 64 percent who either strongly or disapproved of Trump’s performance as president, compared to 31 percent who said they strongly or somewhat approved.
That poll was conducted in October 2025, leaving open the possibility that opinions have changed, given the heightened attention to the Operation Metro Surge immigration crackdown in Minnesota and the shooting deaths of two American citizens by federal agents.
Of those who told voters they would vote for Trump in the 2024 election, 13 percent said they would not do so if given the chance to vote again.
Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny won big at this year’s Grammy Awards and used the opportunity to speak out against US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
The survey also found that 52 percent of respondents intend to vote for Democrats in the 2026 DRM midterms, while 28 percent said they plan to vote Republican.
Although the survey raises economic issues such as Inflation and jobs are top concerns for Latino voters, with immigration policy and presidential outreach also listed as important.
The October survey, conducted by BSP Research and Shaw & Co. The research polling company UnidosUS, used a mixed method where respondents were reached through a mix of live phone interviews, text message invitations and online panels, and 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 lead to significant changes in the way the public votes.
Members of the chamber “feel betrayed by these administrations, because of their extremes,” Villalobos told Politico last month.
