MS NOW's Ari Melber on Thursday exposed what he framed as a glaring act of MAGA hypocrisy — playing a side-by-side clip of right-wingers melting down over Bad Bunny's Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime show while Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an entire address in Spanish.
"Nobody understood a thing!" Fox News host Jesse Watters bemoaned to viewers about the half-time show.
"Not one word of English?" another MAGA commentator raged.
Melber then played a side-by-side clip of Rubio delivering March 7 remarks in Spanish on television from the podium.
"To get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America!" MAGA Megyn Kelly fumed about Bad Bunny's performance.
Rubio "failed" Kelly's "test," Melber said in a separate segment teasing his takedown. He again let the contrast speak for itself, rolling footage of Rubio doing exactly that.
"For MAGA, apparently it's okay when they do it," Melber said dryly. After sharing a Spanish message to viewers, Melber added: 'Hope nobody's upset.'"
Melber brought on music journalist Neil Shah, a former longtime Wall Street Journal reporter and author of an upcoming book on the 2010 hip-hop boom, to put the backlash in context.
Shah said Trump and MAGA's complaints about Bad Bunny were "just out of touch with the reality of music," pointing out that the Puerto Rican superstar has been Spotify's number one artist for much of the last five years.
"Streaming has allowed many of these global artists to crash through the traditional gatekeepers in the American music industry," Shah said, citing Latin music, K-pop, and Afrobeats as genres that have exploded precisely because platforms opened doors the traditional industry kept closed.


