The White House Used a Bad Bunny Song in a Deportation Video. Then It Changed the Translation.
On Thursday, the official White House TikTok account posted a montage of ICE detention footage - people in handcuffs being taken into custody - set to Bad Bunny's "LA MuDANZA." The caption read "We're making America great again." Onscreen, a line from the song got a subtitle that didn't match what Bad Bunny actually sings.
The lyric is "un aplauso pa mami y papi porque en verdad rompieron," which translates to "A round of applause for mom and dad, because they really crushed it" - a line from a song widely understood as a tribute to the artist's own parents. The White House's on-screen translation swapped out "mom and dad" and replaced it with the president's name: "A round of applause for Donald J. Trump because he really crushed it."
The choice of artist is its own story. Trump spent weeks earlier this year criticizing Bad Bunny's selection as the 2026 Super Bowl halftime performer, calling it "absolutely ridiculous" in a February interview on Newsmax's Greg Kelly show. Bad Bunny had not addressed the criticism directly at the time, and it became a recurring flashpoint between his fanbase and the president's supporters through the spring.
Commenters on the White House's TikTok post picked up on the contradiction within hours. "So let me get this straight: Trump publicly mocked Bad Bunny over the Super Bowl... and now a Trump video is using Bad Bunny's music? That's a level of irony you just can't script," one wrote. Others asked more directly why an artist the administration had criticized was being used to score one of its own videos.
Neither Bad Bunny nor his representatives have commented on the video as of publication. Neither has the White House addressed why the subtitle doesn't match the Spanish lyric. The video is still live on the account's TikTok page, captioned exactly as it was posted Thursday afternoon.
