By any normal metric, the Turning Point USA “All-American Halftime Show” was a massive failure. At its peak, it had 6.1 million concurrent views, which might sound good until you learn that the actual NFL halftime show with Bad Bunny had 135 million based on preliminary reports. If that number holds, it will be the most-watched halftime show ever, knocking last year’s Kendrick Lamar show from the top spot.

An alternative that couldn’t even pull five percent of the real-time eyeballs affixed to the dreaded Bunny is not a success, full stop. iIn a normal world, immediately announcing that you were going to do it all over again in 2027 would be deeply odd and delusional.

But the pathetically low viewership doesn’t matter, because the point of the TPUSA halftime show was to gin up outrage over the real halftime show, not to create a well-produced, well-run, or well-performed event. And with so much right-wing money sloshing around, there is no pressure for anything like this to succeed. It just has to come into being.

Notably, the TPUSA show was also not a success as a show. It wasn’t filmed anywhere recognizable and ended up looking like the performers had wandered onstage at CPAC. Headliner Kid Rock’s lip-syncing was off. TPUSA head Erika Kirk couldn’t be bothered to attend. Not exactly a world-class event.

This was never a serious enterprise. Artists weren’t even finalized until a week before the Super Bowl, despite being announced in October. That sort of delay might have been fine if TPUSA had ultimately revealed some amazing heavy hitter, but instead it coughed up the infinitely washed-up Kid Rock and three other country singers who were in no way household names but did have the requisite MAGA grievance politics.

If anything, this haphazard slop shows a complete disregard and disdain for TPUSA fans, Kid Rock fans, and fans of the also-rans: a last-minute lineup, a shitty venue, and no actual broadcast rights. Just a hastily assembled, low-rent event whose purpose was not to provide people with quality entertainment but to serve as a way to howl about Bad Bunny.

Nonetheless, there is an impressive level of post-show flop sweat as conservatives try to tell themselves what a massive success this thing was. Far-right activist Jack Posobiec declared the event was the number one YouTube livestream of all time in various categories and that Kid Rock’s hot new release passed Bad Bunny on iTunes, but without any, you know, proof.

But by midday on Monday, Posobiec was bragging that somehow 40-50 million people watched the thing on some combination of live and streaming and platforms and whatever and therefore, as Posobiec said, “VOTED WITH THEIR REMOTE CONTROLS LAST NIGHT.”Except that is obviously not true. Even if somehow 40-50 million people really did tune in to see Kid Rock beclown himself, it didn’t make a dent in the official halftime show numbers. There was no mass voting via remote control, with people clicking away from Bad Bunny. Instead, it appears that Bad Bunny put up the biggest halftime numbers ever.

This is clearly some self-soothing for Posobiec, but it isn’t really necessary. The money will always be there for next year’s alternative halftime show, because TPUSA had revenue of $85 million in 2024 alone. Under Charlie Kirk, the group raised $389 million from 2012 to 2023, and conservative billionaires just love to give the group money. Even the existence of the alternative halftime show was a fundraising opportunity.

At first glance, the MAGA entertainment world seems similar to the closed world of evangelical entertainment that has been around for decades. However, that stuff is actually popular, albeit with a limited market. It’s telling that TPUSA didn’t pull any of those high-profile Christian recording artists, who arguably would be aligned with TPUSA’s values. Instead, they got a has-been who has a song bragging about statutory rape and some Nashville denizens whose phones aren’t ringing as much as they used to.

The right having such a tremendous amount of money warps the incentives here. No one needs to put on a good show. No one needs to get good ratings. External metrics are meaningless because the point was not to actually dethrone the NFL halftime show, a ludicrous proposition even if TPUSA had landed big performers. The point was just to be angry, to scream about Bad Bunny, and to offer a tepid, half-assed alternative that conservatives are forced to pretend was terrific.That’s true of Bari Weiss at CBS just as much as here. Normally, coming in and having your ratings immediately nosedive and making weird choices to put yourself on camera despite being not at all good at it would be serious missteps for a new leader.

But Weiss isn’t there to do good work. She’s there to push a right-wing agenda. And when she isn’t doing that, she’s got the most low-rent material imaginable, like putting her sister on air to talk about a random Free Press piece.It’s also true of Melania, the documentary that was really just a way for Jeff Bezos to bribe the president. Bezos spent $40 million to make the thing and another $35 million on advertising. Eager conservatives with smaller pocketbooks then had their own opportunity to suck up to Trump by purchasing massive amounts of tickets to artificially prop up sales.

But those moves only work one time, so sales for the second week of this epic tale dropped 67 percent. As with the TPUSA halftime show, there’s an attempt to pretend the film is an actual real piece of art and that people really want to see it, but why bother? The film has already served its dual purposes: letting Trump know just how far Bezos will go to curry favor and giving conservatives talking points about how Real America craves this sort of thing.

At best, this stuff is a waste of time, at worst, pure propaganda. But so many people behind it are in such an insular world that they have convinced themselves that everyone shares their fixations. Normally, that insularity would be pierced by the consistent failures of these projects, but with all that sweet right-wing cash, that never happens. These folks will continue making rage bait for each other, all the while telling themselves they are speaking to the majority of Americans.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos