On Sunday, Bad Bunny is set to perform in the Super Bowl’s halftime show, and President Trump is angry about it. “I think it’s a terrible choice,” Trump seethed recently, referring to the Puerto Rican performer and the band Green Day, who will also play during the San Francisco event. “All it does is sow hatred,” Trump added. “Terrible.”

Though Trump said that’s not why he’s skipping the event—it’s “too far away,” he insisted—this anger at Bad Bunny captures something important about our political moment. As many noted, it comes after Bad Bunny harshly attacked ICE during his Grammy Award acceptance speech, using the movement phrase “ICE out” and claiming of ICE’s victims: “We are Americans.” In response, the White House stupidly raged that he’d attacked “law enforcement.”

But something deeper is going on here than Trump’s usual lashing out at a critic. This clash hints at a genuine fear on Trump’s part that he’s on the defensive big time in the war over ICE—not just in the political war, not just in the war that’s shedding American blood in the streets, but also in the culture war. Because the battle over ICE has become a culture war all unto itself. And Trump is losing it.

The president has long regarded pro and college football—the players and fans, at least—as “his” part of the culture. During his first term, it was commonplace for him or other MAGA personalities to share video of football stadiums in red America cheering him wildly. His propagandists hailed these spectacles as barometers of what “Real America” believes. Just as Trump thinks that biker gangs, cops and coal miners naturally love him, he believes deep in his brainstem that all these tough guy players with forearm tattoos and their cheering, violence-relishing fans just have to be his people.

Indeed,........

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