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‘I think today Donald Trump is gonna sign an executive order banning Black people from halftime,’ The View’s Ana Navarro said on Monday. The hosts of the ABC daytime talk show The View were not only enthralled by Kendrick Lamar’s electric Super Bowl halftime performance, but they joked that the rapper’s set likely upset Donald Trump so much that he was “going to sign an executive order banning Black people from halftime.”.
While much of the attention has centered on Lamar capping off his set with an edited version of his Grammy-winning Drake diss track “Not Like Us,” which also featured surprise guest Serena Williams crip walking, the performance was described by critic Mark Beaumont as representing “a righteous nation baring its teeth” following Trump’s election. “Hip-hop king’s performance will undoubtedly go down as one of the most important halftime shows in the history of the event, if not the most significant mass-televised rap performance of all time,” Beaumont wrote for The Independent.
With legendary actor Samuel L. Jackson serving as MC as our “Uncle Sam,” it appeared that Lamar was fully expecting a conservative backlash when Jackson exclaimed: “Too loud, too reckless, too ghetto. Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game?” Meanwhile, blitzing through a medley of greatest hits, Lamar rapped that the “revolution about to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy.”.
At the top of Monday’s broadcast of The View, co-host Ana Navarro — a vocal “Never Trump” political pundit and strategist — told viewers that she doesn’t “really do sports or football” but that she did have some commentary to share about the halftime show. “I wasn’t watching the game, but listen, I think today Donald Trump is gonna sign an executive order banning Black people from halftime,” she exclaimed to laughter and applause from the studio audience.
She added that “all the racists” on social media were “hopping mad” over the performance, claiming that “if the racists are mad, I am happy as a clam.” Navarro’s colleague Sunny Hostin agreed with her, pointing out that New Orleans is a majority-Black city. “With all these attacks on diversity, all these attacks on African Americans, it was so nice to see Black excellence enjoyed in front of the sitting president who decided for the first time to go to the Super Bowl,” Hostin stated before discussing Lamar’s performance in more detail.
“And then you have Kendrick Lamar. A lot of people didn’t understand his performance. Guys, he’s an award-winning – a Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and poet, okay? It was a many-layered performance. You had Serena Williams crip walking, and it was performance art if you really looked at it,” she said. “Yes, he had people dressed in red, white, and blue, the colors of the flag… because he’s explaining that this is a divided country at this point. He also has them leaning to the side because this country was built on the backs of Black people. So it was very multilayered.”.
