Republican congressman Tim Burchett is going viral for telling a strange story about his old pet rabbit after being asked about Super Bowl halftime performer Bad Bunny.
“Dude, I wouldn’t know if Bad Bunny walked up here and asked me if he could borrow my cell phone,” the Tennessee rep told a TMZ reporter in Washington in a video released on Saturday. “I really don’t know who he is.”
Burchett proceeded to tell the story of his own “bad bunny,” a Flemish giant rabbit named Flop, mating with another Flemish rabbit called Caramel.
“Put ‘em together, phew, it’s true what they say about rabbits,” Burchett continued. “My nephew was like, ‘Uncle Tim, what’s Flop doing to Caramel?’ And I [said], “Go back in the house, dude. It’s not my job to give the sex talk here.”
“And then about a week later, Flop died of a heart attack, so what do you know?” Burchett concluded with a chuckle. “I guess he died doing what he loved.”
The video spread widely online, eliciting a mix of laughter and mild concern.
“Some of y’all ain’t ever been around old southern men and it shows,” Twitch streamer Jordan Powell wrote on X. “Felt like I was listening to an uncle.”
Writer Brandon Streussnig, in a presumably satirical X post of his own, wrote that it “rocks how most of our sitting government is just always sundowning in public and we gotta just deal with it.”
While Burchett’s antics around the Super Bowl performance were light-hearted, if strange, many of his MAGA contemporaries are furious about the selection of Bad Bunny.
The Puerto Rican superstar, real name Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, sings mostly in Spanish and has criticized the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown.
During a recent Grammys acceptance speech, Ocasio lauded immigrants who pursued their dreams and called for an end to mass ICE raids.
“Hate gets more powerful with more hate,” he said. “The only thing that’s more powerful than hate is love. So please, we need to be different. If we fight, we have to do it with love. We don’t hate them. We love our people. We love our family and there’s a way to do it, with love, and don’t forget that.”
Last year, following an ICE raid in Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny called immigration agents involved “motherf***ers” and “sons of b****es.”
The conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA is hosting what it calls its own “All-American Halftime Show” featuring Kid Rock.
When Ocasio’s selection was announced, conservatives raged at the choice, with President Trump calling it “crazy” and “ridiculous.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, meanwhile, threatened to station ICE agents outside the Super Bowl.
The Puerto Rican singer has at times made light of the opposition to his upcoming performance, telling viewers when he hosted Saturday Night Live last year that they had a few months to learn Spanish before his performance.
Bad Bunny has said concerns about immigration raids factored into his decision not to tour the mainland U.S. and instead do a residency in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.
Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, who will also perform during the Super Bowl, called on ICE agents to quit their jobs and warned Trump would “drop them” during a weekend concert in the lead-up to the big game.
“This goes out to all the ICE agents, wherever you are,” Armstrong said at a FanDuel and Spotify party in San Francisco on Friday night. “Quit your s***ty ass job. Quit that s***ty job you have. Because when this is over, and it will be over at some point in time, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Donald Trump — they’re gonna drop you like a bad f***ing habit.”
