President Donald Trump doubled down on his increasingly polarizing immigration policies and railed against a U.S. Olympic athlete who he called a “loser” during a Super Bowl weekend at Mar-a-Lago in which a racist social media post still dogged him.
Trump left from Palm Beach International Airport at about 10 p.m. on Feb. 8 on the return flight to Washington. The president concluded his 20th visit to Palm Beach this term after watching most of Super Bowl 60 at his Trump International Golf Club nearby. The Seattle Seahawks won the NFL championship game, defeating the New England Patriots 29-13.
But it was the halftime show, a performance exclusively in Spanish by Puerto Rican Grammy winner Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, that Trump sharply criticized. The president said the show was “one of the worst” and “an affront” to the country.
“Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for the young children that are watching from the throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World,” he wrote.
The president’s panning of the halftime show was not surprising as Bad Bunny, one of the most streamed music performers in the world, has been a counterweight to Trump administration immigration policies with his calls for unity. The performer has also been unabashedly unapologetic in touting the Spanish language to the chagrin of the MAGA movement.
“We are not savage, we are not animals, we are not aliens, we are humans and we are Americans,” Martinez Ocasio said in his Grammy acceptance speech on Feb. 1. “The hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. So, please, we need to be different.”
Early ratings reports on Feb. 9 showed that the Bad Bunny performance drew 135 million viewers while the alternative show offered by Turning Point USA drew just 6.1 million viewers on YouTube.
Trump: ‘Surprising’ that Vance was booed while at Olympics
One topic that did not come up over the weekend were new findings in the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files. The latest batch of disclosures reportedly show that a key administration official, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, had business ties with the financier and child sex trafficker as recently as 2014.
The president had arrived nearly 48 hours before on Feb. 6 while the country was watching the tape-delayed airing of the Olympic games opening ceremony from Milan and Cortina. Ahead of the ceremonies, several U.S. athletes, including skier Hunter Hess, distanced themselves from Trump administration policies.
“Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” Hess said in speaking with reporters.
Trump said it was “surprising” to learn that Vice President JD Vance, who led the American delegation to the quadrennial sporting event, was booed audibly during the opening ceremony festivities.
In his Feb. 8 post, Trump singled out Hess calling him a loser and saying it is “very hard to root for someone like this.”
Trump also issued two weekend posts supporting his immigration policies.
One cited a poll purportedly showing more Americans support his immigration policies than those who backed the approach of his predecessor, President Joe Biden. A second reposted a Washington Examiner story that posed a pivotal question: “Does America have the resolve to deport illegal border crosser?”
Other surveys, however, suggest Trump’s immigration policies are highly unpopular.
The widely-followed Cook Political Report’s aggregated PollTracker showed both the president’s approval rating — at 41% — and support for his immigration agenda hitting new lows.
“While the White House often takes aim at individual surveys as outliers, the CPR PollTracker’s aggregation of 21 different national polls — including those conducted with a variety of methodologies widely considered to be sound measures of public opinion — leave little room for doubt that the president’s standing with all major groups has declined,” wrote Carrie Dann, CPR managing editor, in a prepared statement.
“What’s more, the decline in the president’s overall approval is particularly steep among the infrequent voter blocs that made up his 2024 coalition and who will be key to the GOP’s midterm hopes — young people, Latinos, and independents.”
Trump meets Honduran president while at Mar-a-Lago
Trump held one official meeting while at his Palm Beach club this past weekend. On Feb. 7, he met with Honduran President Nasry Asfura.
In a social media post, Trump noted that Asfura won the December election “once I gave him my strong Endorsement” and said he and the Honduran counterpart “share many of the same America First Values.”
“We have a close partnership on Security, working together to counter dangerous Cartels and Drug Traffickers, and deporting Illegal Migrants and Gang Members out of the United States,” Trump wrote.
The reference to combating drug trafficking was a contradiction in light of Trump’s Dec. 1 pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras.
Hernández was serving a 45-year prison sentence after a U.S. jury in July 2024 found him guilty of conspiring to import more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, plus related firearms offenses. Nonetheless, Trump said Hernández had been treated “unfairly,” and he was released from prison immediately after receiving the pardon, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Trump’s baseless election claims behind racist post?
After calling this month for nationalizing elections, Trump again called vote counts “rigged.”
The president repeated the claims in a Feb. 8 post even as elections observers have debunked the up-to-now baseless allegations of electoral fraud.
“America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and Laughingstock all over the World,” Trump posted.
Elections observers and others have noted Trump’s allegations, dating to the 2020 presidential election he lost, have been shot down by courts as well as numerous ballot analyses and recounts in contested states.
Still, the president continues to insist election results are not to be trusted and, in the post, he called for all voters to show identification, proof of citizenship when registering and for the elimination of the generalized use of mail-in ballots, which has proven successful and popular in Florida.
A prior post Trump said he liked because it “was a very strong post in terms of voter fraud” continued to generate sharp and angry blowback across the country, even as the president sought to shrug off the firestorm.
That social-media missive, shared by the president on his Truth Social account, included a racist image that depicted former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as apes.
Despite the White House at first dismissing the uproar, even the president’s most stalwart allies condemned the posting.
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, said the image was “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” The Rev. Mark Burns, a Christian minister and co-founder of the NOW television network, called on Trump to fire the unidentified staff member who the administration said was responsible for the post.
“My recommendation to the president was direct and firm,” Burns reported on X after he spoke with Trump. “That staffer should be fired immediately, and the President should publicly condemn this action.”
On his way to Palm Beach on Feb. 6, Trump reiterated that he did not “make a mistake” when asked if he would apologize for the post.
“I guess during the end of it there was some kind of picture that people don’t like,” he said. “I wouldn’t like it, either.”
Just as Air Force One was landing in Palm Beach County, Trump was praising another landmark record on the Dow Jones industrial average — surpassing 50,000 by rising 1,206.95 points on Feb. 6 to close at 50,115.67.
“Record Stock Market, and National Security, driven by our Great TARIFFS,” Trump wrote. “I am predicting 100,000 on the DOW by the end of my Term.”
Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump calls US Olympic athlete a loser, rips Bad Bunny halftime show
Reporting by Antonio Fins, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
