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Lady Gaga sent hidden message to Trump at her Super Bowl performance
The 30-year-old artist did just about everything on Super Bowl Sunday
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Lady Gaga seemed to do everything at her halftime show on Super Bowl Sunday in Houston. She sang, danced, played the piano, and at one point, jumped off the stage to catch a football. It also looks like she might've taken subliminal shots at the president with her song selection.
In the past, the 30-year-old artist has never been afraid to get political. So fans were understandably disappointed when she didn't use her platform to deliver a strong, politically charged statement.
But Gaga may have offered a slight dig at the Trump administration’s suspended travel ban and plans to build a wall along the southern US-Mexico border.
Gaga opened her 12-minute set with "God Bless America" and performed Woodie Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land"—which can be interpreted as a sneak diss against the administration. The song's original lyrics include the line: "There was abig high wall there that tried to stop me.”
Interestingly enough, Guthrie wrote about his contempt for the president’s father, Fred Trump, who was his landlord in the 1950s. Guthrie suggested that Trump was a bigot who turned away potential black tenants in Brooklyn because of their race.
“He thought that Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it,” Will Kaufman, a literature professor at the University of Central Lancashire, told the New York Times last year.
In the 1970s, several years after Guthrie’s death, the Justice Department sued Trump over discrimination against blacks. He eventually settled with the department without admitting guilt.
As rumor has it, the NFL reportedly told Gaga not to make any political statements that could be seen as divisive. Of course, representatives for the league denied this and promised to give her artistic freedom throughout her set. The show comes amidst hundreds of thousands of Americans lining in the streets to protest the new president via nationwide Women’s Marches and emergency rallies against his travel restrictions.
Before the show, Gaga simply promised to use her performance to promote inclusion.
“I believe in a passion for inclusion. I believe in the spirit of equality and the spirit of this country as one of love, and compassion, and kindness,” she told reporters at a news conference last week.
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“My performance will uphold those philosophies,” she continued, “I don’t know if it will succeed in unifying America. You’ll have to ask America when it’s over.”
Watch Gaga's entire Super Bowl LI performance above.