How the ‘subversive genius’ of Kendrick Lamar sent Trump home a loser

The Philadelphia Eagles and Kendrick Lamar’s collective of geniuses made this the Super Bowl we needed.

by Dave Zirin

This year’s Super Bowl in New Orleans could have been a fascist Mardi Gras. Over a week ago, state police forced more than 100 unhoused people, under threat of arrest, into a freezing warehouse from which they barred the press. State agencies destroyed homeless encampments, and the operation cost taxpayers $17.5 million. Then, this last week, police, Secret Service members, and the Department of Homeland Security smothered the Superdome and the city. 

And, of course, Donald Trump would be at the game, the first sitting president — as we’ve been told ad nauseam all week — to go to the biggest spectacle in the country. The scene was set beforehand when Trump got a cozy Fox News interview where, making his frowny face, he again signaled that a judge’s ruling to stop Elon Musk from controlling our financial records doesn’t mean anything to him. He also picked the Kansas City Chiefs to win, citing his affection for Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes’s MAGA wife, Brittany. He also said he was attending the game for the “good for the country.” As if it were not obvious at this point, crypto-coin Trump does nothing for the good of the country. He was there to bask like Caesar in a display of authoritarian power. Trump’s message was that resistance was futile.

Then, the unexpected: In the first half, the Philadelphia Eagles knocked the snot out of Mahomes and the Chiefs. The two-time defending champions looked overmatched — like bullies who withered after being punched in the mouth. But even that trouncing was a pillow fight compared to the halftime show, where hip-hop maestro Kendrick Lamar took center stage. 

Lamar unleashed an artistic inferno rooted in Black culture, Black poetry and Black resistance. Trump’s most prominent racist online trolls — I don’t want to link and give them the attention they crave — were already spitting that it was a “DEI halftime show,” which was more pathetic than upsetting. They are pieces of soggy Wonder bread, reduced to attacking brilliance because it exposes their mediocrity. It’s just stupid to think some addled 78-year-old misogynist caked in orange is the peak of masculinity.

But many of the people watching Lamar were those who have been deeply shaken by the constant, unaccountable cruelty pummelling us every day. Innumerable people — I’ve been hearing from them all week — were praying that Lamar would say something about Trump or Musk to the tens of millions of viewers. They wanted him to take on all the weight of this moment. It’s an understandable desire, but it’s also unfair: a “save us” burden that always disproportionately falls on the shoulders of Black artists. 

A popular slogan now is “No one will save us but us.” This plea was more “Save us, Kendrick.” But Lamar, who is more an abstract master of symbology than political rabble-rouser, performed something right in Trump’s face that I think people will be decoding for years. It was a textured, deeply layered, colossal middle finger to the worst of US history, Trump, and anyone who would try to obliterate Black culture in this country.

Playing off Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam and representing — at least to me — the false promise of assimilation through erasure, Lamar started in a crouching pose. It wasn’t a knee, as in Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police violence, but for someone who is incredibly self-aware of his every physical and verbal metaphor, starting in that posture on a football field was not happenstance. So many people would have cheered a knee — understandably! — but that would have been way too obvious for this man. Then, he started by performing just one bar of a lyric that does not exist in his catalog. He said, “The revolution is about to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.”

To me, these 16 words are not a puzzle but a work of art. It’s not literal. It’s something you hear, something you feel, and something you interpret. Like a moving sculpture or tapestry, you need to account for the intentions of the artist but also how those intentions interact with your own perspective and gut emotional response. I take it as him saying — again in Trump’s face — that our mindset needs to be aimed toward revolution, but do not look to him to carry the weight. It’s the “right time,” but I am the “wrong guy,” if that’s your intent. No more martyrs. This is an “all of us” project.

That “all of us” was on stage. Yes, it was Lamar in the spotlight delivering the most 100 percent pure hip-hop show ever shown to so vast an audience. But it was more than the power of one. He had brilliant Black dancers dressed in red, white and blue, looking like an American flag, and he marched right through them, timing it to the lyric, “40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music / They tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.” To my eyes, he was tearing apart the flag with history and truth — saying you can try to shackle Black people, but Black culture is an ineradicable part of this country. 

It was especially powerful that he did this in New Orleans, a place that has been left for dead time and again but is the cradle of the Black music that is at the heart of this country’s culture. Saying this in the face of the man canceling Black History Month also mattered.

At this point, the dancers were all Black men. For a later song, he was framed exclusively by Black women in nearly identical clothing as the men, moving with both power and grace. Then they all came together. In the middle of it all, a male dancer, on his own it is believed, unfurled a Palestinian flag attached to a Sudanese flag. His protest was surrounded by dancers dressed in all black, faces covered, raising their fists. He held the flags high before being tackled by security and detained. 

Whether planned or not, it connected with the broader themes of resistance, which felt electric, improvisational, and, to those who want to kill hope, dangerous. There is so much more to discuss — the lyrics chosen, SZA’s genius, a very pointed Serena Williams cameo! — but much was also beyond me. I need to read others — like Lamar codebreaker David Dennis Jr. (journalist and son of civil rights legend Dave Dennis), who called Lamar’s performance “subversive genius” and maybe “the biggest rap performance ever.”

As for Trump, according to reports, he stood next to his date, Ivanka, during the halftime show and then immediately left. He is our fragile orange flower and couldn’t bear seeing his dream of Black erasure rebuked. He couldn’t bear seeing art that he was unable to appreciate or understand. He couldn’t bear looking like a loser for picking the Chiefs because he likes the quarterback’s wife. So he hightailed it home before the cameras could catch him. After leaving, to make himself feel better, he banned the penny.

As for the game, the Eagles wrecked the Chiefs, before a couple of late garbage Kansas City touchdowns made it a final score of 40–22. Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, who was clearly the most salty about Trump’s presence in the lead-up to the game — when other players were walking on eggshells — was the official MVP. Now, we’ll see if the Eagles, a team that after winning in 2018 boycotted going to the White House, will even get an invite from the King of Petty. Since he couldn’t stay to congratulate them, I can’t imagine why, if an invitation is offered, they would accept. (If the Chiefs had won, Trump would have preened on the field and chased cameras like a Hollywood ingénue.)

But as great as Hurts was, the real MVPs were the dancers, the choreographers, the costume designers, SZA and Lamar. They created something collective, and we should understand it as cooperative political art, instead of decrying it because Lamar didn’t stand there reading a lefty pamphlet. The Eagles won, and the Chiefs lost. But I’ll remember this as the night when Kendrick Lamar sent Donald Trump home.

Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation magazine, where this column first appeared. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sports. He is also the coproducer and writer of the new documentary “Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL.” Visit and contact him through his website EdgeofSports.com.

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