Last Sunday’s Super Bowl was less of a football game to me and more of an opportunity for musicians to utilize the country’s largest platform to make their position on current events known. After Bad Bunny’s acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards last Saturday night, in which he stood proudly at the podium to receive his Grammy for Best Música Urbana album and said “ICE out!”, I expected him to deliver a similarly pointed message at the Super Bowl halftime show. But I also knew that it would put him at immense risk.
That said, I totally thought Green Day would say something.
Green Day has always been vocal about their political standing, changing the lyrics of “Bang Bang” to include “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist U.S.A.” in several live performances. I mean, the American Idiot album is literally about their frustrations with the decline of democracy during the Bush administration. Given the Super Bowl’s American viewership of over 100 million viewers, according to The Athletic, the halftime show would’ve been a golden opportunity for Green Day to denounce ICE and the Trump administration to their widest audience yet.
Green Day’s Timeline of Anti-Trump Activism
- August 2016: Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong says, “The worst problem I see about Trump is who his followers are. I actually feel bad for them, because they’re poor, working-class people who can’t get a leg up. They’re pissed off, and he’s preyed on their anger. He just said, ‘You have no options, and I’m the only one, and I’m going to take care of it myself.’ I mean, that’s f*cking Hitler, man!” in an interview with Kerrang! Magazine.
- November 2016: Following Trump’s election, Green Day led a chant of “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist U.S.A.” at the American Music Awards.
- August 2017: Following the “Unite the Right” protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, which white supremacists attended, Green Day released a music video for “Troubled Times,” which featured clips from the rally. Armstrong posted on Facebook, “I feel like what happened in Charlottesville goes beyond the point of anger. It makes me sad and desperate.”
- December 2023: At a New Year’s Eve performance, Green Day changed a lyric from “American Idiot” from “I’m not a part of the redneck agenda” to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda” for the first time. This lyric change has remained in several following performances.
- February 2026: At the FanDuel x Spotify weekend event before the Super Bowl, Armstrong called out ICE directly: “This goes out to all the ICE agents out there, wherever you are: quit your sh*tty-ass job. Quit that sh*tty job you have. Because when this is over — and it will be over at some point in time — Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Donald Trump, they’re going to drop you like a bad f*cking habit. Come on this side of the line.”
And yet, at the actual pregame show, it was crickets; no lyric changes, no messages. They played “American Idiot” with the original lyrics, and omitted their 2024 protest song “The American Dream is Killing Me” from their set.
I understand that if Green Day were to make an explicit statement against the current presidential administration, the mass deportations and atrocities ICE is committing against civilians of color, or any other political obscenities afflicting American democracy, there would be huge consequences.
But it’s not like they ever cared about those consequences before…
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