Why is Trump skipping the Super Bowl? He says it’s “too far”
The Rams won’t be the only ones missing from the Super Bowl. President Trump will be conspicuous by his absence at America’s largest annual one-day sporting event.
“It’s just too far,” Trump told the New York Post. “I would if, you know, it was a little shorter.”
Or maybe not so far to his left?
Super Bowl LX will be played Feb. 8 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, a part of the San Francisco Bay Area that Trump has so often vilified.
The teams – the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks – hail from deep-rooted blue states. Massachusetts and Washington have voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1988.
Trump also expressed disgust at the musical artists at this year’s game: Bad Bunny and Green Day, both unapologetic critics of the current administration. Bad Bunny will perform the halftime show while Green Day will perform before kickoff.
“I’m anti-them,” Trump said. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All he does is spread hatred. Terrible.”
Before a tour last fall to promote his newest album, Bad Bunny (real name Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio) announced he would leave the United States because he was afraid of ICE raids at his concerts. The Puerto Rican superstar — who has nearly 84 million monthly listeners on Spotify — explained why he made an exception for the Super Bowl.
“What I feel is beyond me,” he said in a statement. “This is for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could score a touchdown. This is for my people, my culture and our history.”
Green Day, a nearly 40-year-old American pop-punk band, has since Trump’s first term swapped a phrase in the lyrics of the 2004 hit “American Idiot” from “I’m not part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.”
Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit founded by the late Charlie Kirk, announced in October that it would host its own counterprogramming to the Super Bowl and air it on conservative media outlets. The “All American Halftime Show” is billed as “Celebrating Faith, Family and Freedom.” As of Monday, no musical artists had been announced.
Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl a year ago when he received a muted, mixed reaction of cheers and boos in New Orleans. But this year, the five-and-a-half hour flight from Washington DC to the Bay Area is apparently too long for the president, who in January alone visited Switzerland, Detroit and Palm Beach.
Trump has long enjoyed attending high-profile sporting events. He was in attendance at the College Football Playoff title game between Indiana and Miami a week ago and has attended the 2025 Army-Navy college football game, the U.S. Open and the Ryder Cup. In 2019, he attended Game 5 of the World Series in Washington, where he was resoundingly booed.
The NFL has resisted pressure to replace Bad Bunny with an artist more politically palatable to Trump.
“There are a lot of people right now who don’t like Bad Bunny being there at the Super Bowl halftime show,” Tim Ellis, the NFL’s chief marketing officer, said at a conference in October. “Well, not everyone has to like everything we do. Bad Bunny is… awesome.”
Nor does everyone have to like the teams that earned a Super Bowl berth and the states they live in. And not everyone has to approve the location. That includes the president, who has made clear that if he decides to observe, he will do so remotely.
