A Christian singer who faced backlash for a performance at a 2020 tour to protest the impact of COVID shutdowns on churches sang “America the Beautiful” during the pre-show. 

An already-teased Super Bowl ad for a fast food chain featured a scantily clad TikTok influencer, marking the return of racy content for the franchise after an eight-year hiatus. 

Even Taylor Swift’s boyfriend told reporters that he was “excited” and that it was “a great honor” to play with President Donald Trump — who posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on his Truth Social after the singer endorsed Kamala Harris — in attendance. 

They all factored into the overall picture of the Super Bowl, as Trump became the first sitting president to attend the NFL’s biggest game. They were celebrated by the right, cultural wins after November’s political victory. When it comes to the Super Bowl, there was something for everyone when it comes to proverbially owning the libs. 

“We are simply in a backlash moment,” said Jessa Lingel, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies digital culture and gender. The Carl’s Jr. ad with Alix Earle “would look just fine in the ’90s or even earlier,” she said. Advertising companies “are feeling like they can go back to things that have worked very well in the past. You’re seeing more hypersexualization. You’re seeing a movement away from diversity campaigns.”

The Carl’s Jr. ad shows Earle, a TikTok star with 7 million followers and a recently inked podcast deal, provocatively eating the brand’s Hangover Burger, sauce squirting out over passed-out men sports fans. It follows ads from Super Bowls past that showed Paris Hilton, Kate Upton and Kim Kardashian suggestively eating fast food items, though the company moved away from those in 2017, the year Trump took office the first time. 

Emily Contois, an associate professor at the University of Tulsa who studies gender, media and consumer culture, noted that this Super Bowl, and its ads, stand in stark contrast to the 2017 game. She described the first Super Bowl of the first Trump term as “a moment of resistance when it came to women’s rights and women’s representation.” Carl’s Jr. halted its “burgers, bikinis and boobs” ad strategy in favor of one focused on food quality and its history as a company. “The fact that we are again in a Trump presidency and we’re not seeing big shifts to resistance is a big message that we are in a different conservative moment,” Contois said.

Andrew Puzder, the former CEO of Carl’s Jr.’s parent company, in 2017 defended the racy ads, saying they had saved the company. The interview followed Puzder’s withdrawal of his nomination to be Trump’s labor secretary after allegations of spousal abuse surfaced. He denied those allegations; Puzder is now Trump’s pick to serve as ambassador to the European Union, one of a number of people in Trump’s orbit to have been accused of sexual misconduct. 

Trump himself in 2023 was found liable for sexual abuse and has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women. He has appointed people to his administration who have embraced retro views of women’s roles — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said women shouldn’t serve in combat, a view he didn’t repeat during his confirmation hearings. 

The ads, and the fact that accusations against men in positions of political power aren’t disqualifying, are part of a backlash against the advancement of women and people of color in exchange for a deep embrace of machismo.

“They’re trying to read the room,” Lingel said of the advertisers, content creators and cultural figures that all swirled around this year’s Super Bowl, while also signaling a certain kind of political value system. 

Many of the people who have championed Trump’s vision for America also criticized the halftime performer, hip-hop star Kendrick Lamar. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew his nomination to serve as Trump’s attorney general amid mounting concerns about an alleged history of sexual misconduct, including having paid for sex with minors, shared on X last night: “The halftime show you just watched is clearly the regime’s response to Trump’s historic gains with black men.” (Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.) 

Lamar’s 12-minute-long set opened with actor Samuel L. Jackson as Uncle Sam as means of introduction. Then Lamar gleefully shouted to the audience, “The revolution about to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy” — a reference to a poem and song by Gil Scott-Heron. Jackson’s Uncle Sam interjected, saying that Lamar and his all-Black crew of backup dancers were “too loud, too reckless, too ghetto.” The backup dancers — taking the stage during Black History Month dressed in red, white and blue — frequently stood in formations that created an American flag. Lamar was the first solo rapper to headline the Super Bowl halftime show — and did it in the first year since 2021 where the words “End Racism” did not appear in the Super Bowl end zones. 

Lauren Daigle’s performance represented a different version of narrating the American experience. 

Daigle has described her Super Bowl appearance in New Orleans this year as “vindication” for what happened when she made an impromptu appearance at the “Let Us Worship” tour stop in New Orleans in November 2020 and was invited on stage to sing. Daigle said she was riding her bike when she happened to pass the event, organized by Christian singer and worship leader Sean Feucht to protest COVID-related restrictions on in-person gathering at churches and other houses of worship. The event had several hundred attendees, and local media reported many of these attendees came without face masks in defiance of local public health orders. Daigle’s unplanned appearance led to New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell asking for the singer to be removed from the New Orleans programming of the “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rocking Eve.” (Daigle has confirmed that she was in negotiations to appear on the program, but was not a confirmed performer at that point.) 

Last week, Fox News celebrated Daigle’s Super Bowl performance, as did Trump’s second ex-wife, Marla Maples, who has posted multiple times to her Instagram stories about Daigle. Daigle, who has kept quiet about her own politics, told Raymond Arroyo on the “Arroyo Grande” podcast that her goal for her performance was to sing “America the Beautiful” in a way that “will cut through to this generation, the age that we are living in right now, the political climate that we’re living in right now” and to use the song “to cut through to people who might be jaded toward our country or might not love what we have in this country or what we’ve built in this country.” 

Before the game, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, known to many women simply as “Taylor’s boyfriend,” told reporters, “It’s a great honor, I think, no matter who the president is. I’m excited because it’s the biggest game of my life, you know, and having the president there – it’s the best country in the world so it’d be pretty cool.” (In comparison, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts answered the same question by saying, “He’s welcome to do what he wants.”)

Kelce’s comments were the latest reason that NFL fans had to perceive the Chiefs as being Trump’s team, with the Eagles standing in for the so-called resistance. (Hurts also received a deluge of press in the lead-up for the game for his all-woman management team; Eagles Assistant Coach Autumn Lockwood is the first Black woman to coach a team to a Super Bowl win.)

In May, Chiefs’ kicker Harrison Butker delivered a commencement address urging men to “fight against the cultural emasculation of men” and “dangerous gender ideologies.” Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ wife, Brittany, faced intense media scrutiny over her liking of Trump-Vance and MAGA content on Instagram (Trump himself praised Mahomes in a pre-game interview with Fox’s Brett Baier, saying, “I watched this great quarterback, who has, by the way, has a phenomenal wife. She’s a Trump fan. She’s a MAGA fan, so I happened to love her, but she’s a great person.”) 

Meanwhile, Swift faced a roar of boos when she was shown on the Jumbotron at last night’s game — whether for her switched allegiance from the Eagles to the Chiefs or for her political opinions is unclear, though. Either way, Trump celebrated the boos on his social media site.  “MAGA is very unforgiving!” he wrote on Truth Social of what happened to Swift at the game. (Neither Kelce nor Swift have given any kind of public response to Trump’s comments.)

In the first Super Bowl of the second Trump term, it felt like many cultural figures were angling for a piece of the Trumpian cultural pie, in ways both big and small. “Sports are political,” Contois said. “These ads are culture. They mean something. They say something. Some of them cost $8 million for 30 seconds. So they’re the most expensive air time on American television. If they’re going to speak, it’s an opportunity to say something. And very few of these ads took that plunge.”

Contois noted that even as Nike garnered headlines for its ad about women’s sports, just 28 percent of celebrities featured in this year’s Super Bowl ads were women — despite the Super Bowl historically and consistently having a 50-50 viewership among men and women watchers. 

“The Super Bowl is our last mass media moment where a gigantic audience that is relatively diverse across every possible identity category tunes in. The ads, when it comes to gender in particular, do reflect some ambivalence of the moment that we’re in — that women are making great strides in some areas…but it’s also really clear to see the ways that some rights are being turned back,” she said. “Women’s representation is in an incredibly frustrating holding pattern and the same goes for masculinity, too.”

Contois also stressed the significance that Trump’s own presence at the game had. As the broadcaster of the Super Bowl, Fox promoted its own shows, including in spots for Fox News that used repeated images from the assassination attempt made on Trump over the summer. 

“This was Fox News saying, ‘These are the stories of America that we tell,’” Contois said.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Travis Kelce's position on the Chiefs.