It has been a rough weekend to be a Ritchie, as Kid Rock headlined the "alternative" halftime show put on by right-wing think tank Turning Point USA, going head to head with Bad Bunny's halftime performance at Super Bowl LX. The show, which also featured Lee Brice and Gabby Barrett, was set to be an "all-American" celebration of "faith, family, and freedom."
What was not taken into account was licensing, which prevented the show from being streamed on X (formerly Twitter) as was originally advertised. Not even two hours before the show, TPUSA's socials encouraged fans to stream the show on YouTube:
UPDATE: Due to licensing restrictions, we are unable to stream The All-American Halftime Show on X.
— Turning Point USA (@TPUSA) February 8, 2026
Head on over to our YouTube channel tonight around 8PM ET to watch the full show 🇺🇸
And we're just going to gloss over some of Kid Rock's lyrics, namely "some say that's statutory (but I say it's mandatory)."
The party of family values, friends and neighbors.
It's also worth pointing out that while Bad Bunny has an estimated 90 million listeners on Spotify, Kid Rock has roughly 5 million, according to estimates put forth by The Hollywood Reporter. Even if you throw in his co-stars listener totals, the grand sum comes to not even one-fifth of Benito's.
Even the man himself acknowledged as much in a statement last week, affirming that “we’re approaching this show like David and Goliath. Competing with the pro football machine and a global pop superstar is almost impossible…or is it?” And he would know, given that he took part in the halftime show at Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004.
Well... he may be too old to kid, but it turns out he is also too soft to rock.
Estimates are rolling in by the hour, and even the most generous estimates by outlets such as The New York Times put the Turning Point event at around 6.1 million viewers, with estimates at time of publication putting it at around 20 million views. Not bad for something announced in October and riddled with technical and logistical issues, right?
Well... the Bad Bunny performance has amassed 29 million views at time of publication, and that's before you take into account the live viewership of the Super Bowl. And in numbers from Nielsen, last year's Super Bowl pulled in around 127.7 million viewers in total, following a steady upward trend of the past five years.
It's even worse when you take into account Animal Planet's aww-stravaganza that is the Puppy Bowl, which raked in an estimated 12 million viewers in its cozy Sunday afternoon timeslot, more than doubling TPUSA's shitshow.
Final numbers will come out later this week, of course, but either way you slice it, the phoned-in, slapdash wet fart of a freedom fest puffed its proverbial chest out and got trucked. Never mind that Kid Rock was called out on lip syncing, something that is especially wild considering that he was on a soundstage and not in a stadium. A controlled environment that even he could not control.
I think it's safe to say that we all saw this coming, but even still, they're apparently running it back, as Turning Point USA are considering doing it again next year. One small problem... their figurehead that is the Orange Menace himself wasn't even watching TPUSA's show, but rather Bad Bunny's, and there is photographic evidence to back it up.
No matter how hard the MAGA chuds want to pound their chests and call this charade a win for America, the numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for them at halftime.
