This Super Bowl showed Donald Trump and Elon Musk won’t easily undo America’s strength | Opinion
Except for what happened on the football field, the Super Bowl was so uplifting, reminding us as it did that Presidents Trump and Musk have a long way to go to turn America back into a place where, as one of their highest ranking new State Department officials put it, only white men are entitled to succeed. (Exact October 2024 quote from Darren Beattie: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”)
You can repeal Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 executive order banning discrimination in hiring by government contractors — that happened — and appoint yourself sole arbiter of a new golden age of culture, firing all at the Kennedy Center “who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” (Yes, that sounds like exactly what you think it sounds like.)
You can even appoint yourself chair of that until now widely respected institution, where I guess all future programs will alternate between Wagner, the Village People and Kid Rock. But the Super Bowl halftime show by rapper Kendrick Lamar, with appearances by Samuel L. Jackson and Serena Williams, is still going to be what a lot of America looks to and loves.
One thing that I think the conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart was right about is that politics is downstream from culture. And art is not so easy to contain.
So sure, you can order all those West Point clubs for people who don’t look like you to disband — because you never know what those Black and women Army engineers might get up to. But New Orleans, where free people of color were already performing opera back in 1796, is still going to answer with the gorgeous, jazz-infused ”America the Beautiful” of Jon Batiste.
Everything that MAGA loathes about America — especially that we are not threatened, but instead are powered by our diversity — was center stage and shimmering at the Super Bowl.
You can give a dodgy 25-year-old DOGE employee who last fall posted that he was “racist before it was cool” access to our private data, declare that basic fairness is suddenly somehow unfair, and imply that any successful person who is not a white guy only got there because of “DEI,” but even the Super Bowl commercials said otherwise.
My favorite, the Nike ad starring a bunch of top women athletes — Caitlin Clark, Jordan Chiles, Sha-Carri Richardson — was both a funny and powerful retort to the double standard applied to women in not just sports but all fields.
“You can’t be demanding. You can’t be relentless. You can’t put yourself first. So, put yourself first. You can’t be confident. So be confident. You can’t challenge, so challenge. You can’t dominate. So dominate. You can’t flex, so flex. You can’t fill a stadium, so fill that stadium. … Whatever you do, you can’t win. So win.”
I saw where some conservative critics saw the ad as defeatist, and said Nike should go back to “Just Do It,” but this was “Just Do It” on steroids. You know, without the steroids.
I also loved that Jeep commercial featuring Harrison Ford, the American flag and footage from World War II, plus some perfectly sprinkled snow. In any other year, it would have been an unchallenging, anodyne ad celebrating, well, everybody, but not this time. “Real heroes are humble,” Ford says. “They’re not driven by pride. Pride is a terrible driver. … We won’t always agree on which way to go, but our differences can be our strength.”
Throughout our history, that’s been the case. And it’s going to take more than one really prideful driver and the pillager who spent $288 million to bring him to power to change that.
This story was originally published February 11, 2025 at 7:02 AM with the headline "This Super Bowl showed Donald Trump and Elon Musk won’t easily undo America’s strength | Opinion."
