“Salutations!” beams Samuel L Jackson, spinning around the centrefield of New Orleans’s Caesars Superdome clad in a traditional all-American red, white and blue tailcoat and wisps of white beard, our host and personification of the new US resistance. “It’s your Uncle Sam, and this is the great American game!”
The stakes of the Super Bowl halftime show have never been higher. As Kendrick Lamar appears crouched in a spotlight on the hood of a classic GNX car beneath the crab-like eyes of Donald J Trump – the first sitting president ever to attend a Super Bowl – he seems impishly intent on using the biggest moment of his career so far to charm and disarm the cruel world order. “The revolution about to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy,” Lamar raps. And, among 120 million global viewers, the right-thinking world holds its breath for scandal, spectacle and a second, ideologically polarised 2025 inauguration.
