Thursday, February 12, 2026
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Opinion | Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show - The New York Times
Which Bad Bunny Halftime Show Did You See?
By Petra R. Rivera-Rideau and Vanessa Díaz
"Drs. Rivera-Rideau and Díaz are the authors of “P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.”
Bad Bunny made history at the Super Bowl on Sunday, giving voice to Puerto Rican history and culture, and doing so in Spanish at a time when that alone could get you picked up by masked immigration agents. Though Bad Bunny did not yell “ICE out” or otherwise call out the Trump administration directly, his performance was unapologetically political.
And you know what? It was a party, too, complete with live salsa, perreo dancing and even a wedding. You didn’t have to understand Spanish or know anything of what he was talking about to enjoy it. But if you do speak Spanish, it was so much more.
We knew he would probably use the show to make a statement, but even we weren’t prepared for the emotional roller coaster Bad Bunny, a.k.a. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, took us on. It felt subversive to see this display of joy, pride and resistance. It often felt as though there were two different shows unfolding — one for America and one for América.
His 13-minute set opened with a man dressed in white, guitar in hand and wearing a pava, the classic straw hat worn by the Puerto Rican jíbaro, or small farmer, a contradictory symbol who is the embodiment of Puerto Rican national culture. “Que rico es ser Latino,” he said, holding his guitar. “How wonderful it is to be Latino.” That line tugged on the heartstrings of Latinos, immigrants and others who, like Bad Bunny, have been told they don’t belong here.
At times Bad Bunny looked into the camera and spoke to us directly — in Spanish, telling us to believe in ourselves, that we are so much more than we think we are. He sang, “Este es P.R.” — “This is P.R.” — and winked through the camera to those of us at home. And of course there were the white plastic chairsthat have come to symbolize the displacement addressed in his recent album and that sit in and on patios, porches and marquesinas, or carports, all over the Americas.
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People magazine described the performance as a “fun-filled dance party” that largely abandoned politics in favor of sexiness, joy and tropical flavor. A friend texted to say she was especially annoyed when one media outlet referred to the plants onstage as “shrubbery,” oblivious to how those sugar cane fields recalled a long history of chattel slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean.
During the set, Bad Bunny performed “El Apagón,” a searing critique of Puerto Rico’s failing electrical grid and the long legacy of colonialism behind it. The jíbaros were recast as electrical workers, evoking the ingenuity of Puerto Ricans rebuilding after Hurricane Maria amid federal negligence. Where some viewers may have seen only electrical poles, we saw an acknowledgment of one of the most painful chapters in Puerto Rico’s recent history. And yet, the workers and Bad Bunny still danced, still partied, still lived.
Our friends in Los Angeles cheered when they saw the popular Villa’s Tacos stand, while those in Brooklyn lit up when Toñita of Williamsburg’s Caribbean Social Club handed Bad Bunny a drink. Nearly halfway through the show, the music stopped, and the camera cut to a real couple — two fans who had originally invited Bad Bunny to their wedding — being pronounced husband and wife during the performance.
In the reception scene that followed, the sight of a child dozing across the chairs reminded us of family parties and the endless waiting for our parents to call it a night. We saw ourselves in the little girl Bad Bunny spun around — memories of itchy puffy dresses at family gatherings, dancing with uncles, weaving between grown-ups to chase cousins. “Baila sin miedo, ama sin miedo,” Bad Bunny shouted. “Dance without fear. Love without fear.”
But there was more than feel-good nostalgia wrapped up in that halftime show. In one particularly poignant moment, Ricky Martin appeared sitting on a white chair in the Puerto Rican countryside to sing “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” one of Bad Bunny’s most explicit pro-independence anthems. In the song, Bad Bunny urges Puerto Ricans to hold onto their culture and their land in the face of gentrification and displacement.
Mr. Martin crossed over into the English-language market during the 1990s, helping usher in the Latin pop boom. To do so, he embodied many of the stereotypes associated with Latinos. Many likely remember him as the happy-go-lucky, hip-thrusting Latin lover who urged you to “shake your bon-bon.” Since then, he has come out as gay and become a vocal advocate for Puerto Rican sovereignty, joining Bad Bunny at the 2019 protests that led to the ouster of the governor at the time, Ricardo Rosselló.
In Mr. Martin’s autobiography, he wrote that he feared that acknowledging he was gay would ruin his career. He didn’t publicly come out until he was in his late 30s. As he sang, our minds flashed back to a scene moments earlier, where two male dancers grinded together as they stared at each other, sin miedo. It was a quiet yet defiant statement about queerness, visibility and Latin identity.
Bad Bunny showed us that when he said “We are Americans” at the Grammys, he wasn’t merely referring to citizenship status. He was challenging this country’s ever-narrowing definitions of who is — and is not — American.
Through a celebration of wedding, family, joy and community, he created a showcase in which many Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans, felt seen, heard and represented at every turn, with millions dancing along at home, even if they didn’t know exactly what was going on. He invited us all to join the party. And that might just be the biggest form of resistance for all.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Which Bad Bunny Performance Did You See?"
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
A Campaign to Revoke the Endangerment Finding Appears Near ‘Total Victory’ - The New York Times
Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation
"A small group of conservative activists has worked for 16 years to stop all government efforts to fight climate change. Their efforts seem poised to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declaring that global warming posed a “clear and present danger” to the United States.
But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, were high-profile allies of Donald Trump. Mr. Vought, who has railed against “climate alarmism,” and Mr. Clark, who has called climate rules a “Leninistic” plot to seize control of the economy, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives.
The other two, Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, were lesser-known conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate initiatives. Ms. Gunasekara, a onetime aide to the most vocal global warming denialist in the Senate, and Mr. Brightbill, who had argued in court against Obama-era climate regulations, collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming, documents show.
Their efforts are now paying off. In the coming days, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to revoke a determination that has underpinned the federal government’s ability to fight global warming since 2009.
That scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are supercharging storms, wildfires, drought, heat waves and sea level rise, and are therefore threatening public health and welfare. It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.
In revoking that determination, the Trump administration would erase limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and industries that generate the planet-warming pollution.
Unlike the swings in federal policy that have become routine when administrations change hands, getting rid of the endangerment finding could hamstring any future administration’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
“We are pretty close to total victory,” said Myron Ebell, who helped the first Trump administration set up its operations at the E.P.A. and has been attacking climate science and policies for nearly three decades.
Mr. Ebell said that dozens of conservative activists, lawyers, scientists and others had worked for years to prepare the case against the endangerment finding. But he singled out Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark, Mr. Brightbill and Ms. Gunasekara as the ones who drafted detailed plans of attack that the second Trump administration has largely followed.
“No amount of outside public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy,” he said.
Funding an ‘Arsenal’
When the E.P.A. issued the endangerment finding under President Barack Obama, conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle it.
But as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow, many corporations withdrew from the battle. By 2017, when Mr. Trump first took office, hundreds of U.S. companies, including oil giants and major manufacturers, had accepted the reality of climate change.
Even Mr. Trump’s top advisers at the time rejected the most extreme demands of those who wanted to challenge the science. Days before Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, his E.P.A. denied a petition from Mr. Ebell’s group to reconsider the endangerment finding.
“There just wasn’t an appetite among any of the institutional crowd,” said Michael McKenna, who worked in the White House on energy issues during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Still, some conservative activists who insisted that the threat of climate change was overblown kept up the fight during the Biden years.
One of them was Ms. Gunasekara, who served as E.P.A. chief of staff during Mr. Trump’s first term and wrote the E.P.A. chapter in Project 2025, the set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term. Another was Mr. Brightbill, a partner at the law firm Winston & Strawn who had served in the Justice Department’s environment division during the first Trump administration.
Ms. Gunasekara is known in Washington for handing a snowball to James M. Inhofe, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma and her boss, on a cold February day in 2015. Mr. Inhofe held up the snowball in the well of the Senate as evidence that the planet could not be warming dangerously.
Mr. Brightbill, for his part, had gained some attention for prosecuting the owners of the Oklahoma zoo featured in the Netflix documentary series “Tiger King.” But his main focus as a federal attorney had been defending the first Trump administration’s repeal of Obama-era climate rules, including a landmark regulation aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from power plant smokestacks.
In the summer of 2022, as Mr. Biden and Democratic lawmakers were ramping up their climate efforts, Ms. Gunasekara and Mr. Brightbill sought $2 million for a secretive campaign to kill the endangerment finding, according to a funding pitch obtained by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry.
The two wanted funding to draft regulatory documents that a future administration could use to abandon the endangerment finding. They also planned to solicit white papers from favored scientists who did not accept the physics of climate change.
The endangerment finding had helped Democrats wage a “war on fossil fuels,” Ms. Gunasekara and Mr. Brightbill wrote in the funding pitch. Conservatives needed a comprehensive strategy for reversing the finding on “Day 1” of the next Republican administration, they wrote.
The campaign would operate in secret “to prevent media and other conflicted sources from shaming participants and undercutting the work before it is done,” they added.
The Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, although it is unclear whether the group provided the full $2 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation, where Ms. Gunasekara was a visiting fellow from September 2022 to December 2024, did not respond to questions.
Ms. Gunasekara said in a text message that she was “extremely proud of the work I and others produced at the Heritage Foundation to rebut junk science and expose the Green New Scam.” She said her work for the group had helped inform “Cooling the Climate Hysteria,” a collection of essays by scholars who reject mainstream climate science. It features a melting ice cube on its cover.
Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, where Mr. Brightbill is now the general counsel, declined to make Mr. Brightbill available for an interview but said in an email, “Jonathan Brightbill brings a deep understanding of energy and environmental issues that make him exceptionally qualified for his role.”
Clinching ‘Total Victory’
While many conservatives lined up against the endangerment finding when it was established, Mr. Clark started to fight its core principles many years earlier.
In 2005, as a 38-year-old Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Clark argued in federal court that the Clean Air Act did not give the E.P.A. the power to regulate greenhouse gases. The Supreme Court rejected that argument in a landmark 2007 case called Massachusetts v. E.P.A., clearing the way for the agency to issue the endangerment finding two years later.
It was a stinging defeat that Mr. Clark was determined to reverse, according to people familiar with the matter and his own remarks on podcasts, panels and other public forums.
His next opportunity came in 2022, when he joined a conservative research organization called the Center for Renewing America. Mr. Vought was running the center from an old rowhouse near the Capitol, where he complained of pigeons infesting the walls. From there, Mr. Vought drew up sweeping plans for a second Trump administration.
Under Mr. Vought’s supervision, Mr. Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap Mr. Biden’s climate policies, according to two people familiar with the matter. He also brainstormed legal arguments that the future administration could use to repeal the endangerment finding, the people said.
Former colleagues of Mr. Clark’s said he was less concerned with reducing the costs to companies of complying with environmental laws than with fighting what he saw as government overreach in the form of climate policies.
Mr. Clark has called climate initiatives part of a plot to “control” Americans” and to undermine the U.S. economy. He has called environmentalists a “crazy climate cult” and compared them to the authoritarian pig characters in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Animal Farm.”
Mr. Clark is “an ideologue with very, very strong views that E.P.A. shouldn’t regulate greenhouse gases,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School and the author of the book “The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court,” in which Mr. Clark figures prominently.
“For the Russell Voughts, the Jeff Clarks, this has been a bee in their bonnet,” Mr. Lazarus said.
At the time that he was hired by Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark was facing a criminal investigation in connection with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. President Trump preemptively pardoned Mr. Clark in November and the Georgia case was dismissed.
With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House last year, Mr. Clark became the government’s top regulatory official as the acting head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Vought is once again the White House budget director and Mr. Clark’s boss.
In their new roles, both men have focused on ridding the government of green initiatives. And Mr. Clark has pushed E.P.A. lawyers to strengthen their legal arguments for repealing the endangerment finding, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Allie McCandless, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget, declined to make Mr. Clark available for an interview or respond to questions about his work. She said in a statement that Trump administration officials were “working in lock step to execute on the president’s deregulation agenda.”
Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, said conservative activists had helped sustain the fight against the endangerment finding even after businesses backed out.
“It’s not the corporate interests,” Mr. Chatterjee said, adding, “It’s the pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax, who believe that this was about transferring wealth and driving socialism and destroying renewable energy and promoting left-wing ideology.”
“This is their moment,” Mr. Chatterjee said.
Steven J. Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who runs a website that promotes theories saying that climate change is not real, said the years of work of conservative activists might have gone nowhere if a different Republican had won the presidency. Instead, the activists found a receptive audience in Mr. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and a “con job.”
The next challenge is to ensure the repeal of the endangerment finding holds up in court, he said.
“We’ve kept the skepticism alive,” Mr. Milloy said, adding, “I hope we don’t blow it. I don’t know when or if this opportunity will come around again.”
Coral Davenport contributed reporting.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington."
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