Alexis Wilkins, the 27-year-old Nashville country singer and conservative commentator who dates FBI Director Kash Patel, fired off a warning to her own party Sunday night: the Democrats are winning a branding war, and Republicans are letting them.

According to The Hill, Wilkins was responding to the Democratic Party's official X account, which had posted a stars-and-stripes graphic of Bad Bunny captioned "All-American Halftime with Bad Bunny" — a savvy bit of political packaging wrapped around the Puerto Rican rapper's Super Bowl halftime performance in Santa Clara, California.

"Unpopular: Republicans need to unite and get on better messaging because this branding is fantastic and allows all dems to get behind it. Also – super aesthetic."

The post drew immediate attention — and not all of it friendly from the right.

The Clarification

By Monday, Wilkins posted a follow-up that sharpened her point and made clear she wasn't praising the show itself:

"An important clarification on my post last night: I didn't watch Bad Bunny's performance at all. My point wasn't the show."

Then came the real argument:

"My point was that we can't give the left an inch of the ground we gained in the last election. They're clearly going to cosplay as people who 'love America' and our constitution to pick up moderates and youth votes."

That word — cosplay — does a lot of work. And she's not wrong about the tactic.

What the Democrats Actually Did

Consider the mechanics of what happened Sunday night. Bad Bunny — a performer who backed Kamala Harris in 2024 and has publicly railed against ICE — takes the Super Bowl halftime stage. Within hours, the Democratic Party's official account slaps a patriotic filter on his image and brands the whole thing "All-American."

This is the same party that spent years treating patriotic symbolism as suspect, that winced at flag pins and flinched at "America First." Now they're wrapping a Harris-endorsed, ICE-bashing entertainer in the Stars and Stripes and calling it apple pie.

The contradiction is the strategy. Appropriate the aesthetic. Neutralize the critique. Make the opposition look like they're arguing against fun.

Trump Didn't Hold Back

President Trump offered his own review on Truth Social Sunday, and subtlety was not on the menu:

"The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER! It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn't represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence."

He went further:

"Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World."

That's the President speaking with characteristic directness. And to millions of Americans watching with their families, the sentiment landed. The halftime show has long been a cultural flashpoint, and Trump understands — better than most politicians in either party — that culture is upstream of politics.

The Deeper Play

Wilkins's point, stripped of the online noise, is strategic and worth taking seriously. Republicans made historic inroads with Latino voters in 2024. The ground shifted. The left noticed.

So what does the Democratic Party do? It doesn't change its policies. It doesn't rethink its open-borders instincts or its regulatory stranglehold on working families. It rebrands. It takes a globally famous Latino artist, launders his anti-enforcement politics through a halftime spectacle, and packages the whole thing as red-blooded Americana.

That's not governance. It's graphic design.

But graphic design works — especially on the young voters and moderates, Wilkins flagged. The left has always understood cultural real estate better than the right. Hollywood, music, sports broadcasts — these are the spaces where millions of persuadable Americans actually spend their attention. Republicans have historically ceded that ground, then acted surprised when the culture moved without them.

The 'Cosplay' Problem

Wilkins called it cosplay, and the framing is precise. The Democratic Party isn't embracing patriotism — it's wearing patriotism as a costume when the cameras are on. The same apparatus that platformed Bad Bunny's anti-ICE rhetoric now dresses him in stars and stripes for a Super Bowl ad buy.

This is what institutional messaging looks like when it's run by people who understand aesthetics but have abandoned substance. And it will keep working until the right develops a counter-strategy more sophisticated than simply pointing out the hypocrisy — because pointing out hypocrisy, however satisfying, has never once stopped the left from doing it again.

Where the GOP Goes From Here

The uncomfortable truth Wilkins raised is that the Republican Party has the policy. It has the results. It had the 2024 mandate. What it often lacks is the packaging — the cultural fluency to make its message travel beyond the already converted.

Democrats just turned a halftime show into a voter outreach campaign in real time. The GOP's response was scattered — some cheered the President's bluntness, others bristled at Wilkins for noticing the left's play. Neither reaction constitutes a strategy.

Wilkins isn't saying capitulate. She's saying compete. There's a difference — and the party that figures it out first will own the next decade of American politics.