EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: Who’s in the White House shouldn’t matter when it comes to cheering for your country’s team.
If President Trump congratulating the U.S. Men’s Hockey Team for winning the gold medal at this year’s Winter Olympics didn’t tick off progressives enough, here comes the biggest sporting event on the planet (yes, it is) — soccer’s World Cup.
The majority of this tournament’s games will be played in the United States, and Mexico and Canada host a smattering of games.
Wake Forest Philosophy Professor Adam Kadlac pondered last week if Americans “should feel guilty” if they root against the U.S. team due to the current occupant of the White House. After all, Kadlac notes Trump is “historically unpopular” and his critics are worried about his “sportswashing.”
“I think a deep love of country can coexist with ambivalent feelings about how the national team performs on the field,” the author of “The Ethics of Sports Fandom and “The Magic Kingdom and the Meaning of Life – A Philosopher Visits Disney World” writes.
“If patriots can disapprove of their country’s military adventurism – either because they see it as flatly unjust or because it casts their country in an unfavorable light on the international stage – there is nothing fundamentally unpatriotic about not wanting the U.S. to do well in the World Cup.”
Kadlac (pictured) concedes some fans “might invoke the mantra that it’s important to simply keep politics out of sports – that the games should be a refuge from the controversies that plague so many other aspects of civic life,” but claims “fully separating politics and sports is almost impossible.
“It requires fans to view athletes as nothing more than bodies who exist to perform on the field,” he says.
Well, yeah. Athletes, especially those who specifically represent the country like the U.S. Olympic hockey and World Cup teams should be precisely that. They’re supposed represent all Americans, across all demographics, including political.
Alas, as with so many other things since 2016, Donald Trump has been made a different matter. Although presidents always have invited winning teams to the White House and have called to congratulate championship efforts, Trump doing so is a cause for concern.
Certainly Trump loves a spotlight, but he can’t even go see the team he’s followed for decades, the New York Knicks (who’re currently playing the NBA Finals), without making people crazy. Imbeciles like pink-hatted, Temu-Obama House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries even outright lie about it:
Hakeem Jeffries: “It also is not clear to me that Donald Trump is a big Knicks fan. I mean does this guy even know the difference between Karl Rove and Karl-Anthony Towns?!? I don’t think so. He’s just injecting himself into the NBA Finals because he always has to bring the MAGA… pic.twitter.com/zwcZurlflm
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 8, 2026
(Thankfully, there was one sane voice on the matter):
🚨 WOW! NBA Commissioner Adam Silver just went full TRUMP MODE at Madison Square Garden
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 9, 2026
“He was a FIXTURE at Madison Square Garden…he had courtside seats, here ALL the time. He was at drafts. He’s a GENUINE Knicks fan.” 🔥
“The arena is packed. People got through extra… pic.twitter.com/0PaP1FjTHG
MORE: Chants of ‘Trump!’ during basketball game ‘racially motivated’; students face possible discipline
Trump’s alleged “historically unpopular” approval ratings currently aren’t as low as Jimmy Carter’s leading up to the 1980 Winter Olympics, but 46 years ago was quite a different political environment in the U.S. We didn’t use virtually any pretext, especially sports, to criticize the chief exec.
President Carter actually got a big approval bump thanks to those Olympics’ historic “Miracle on Ice,” but his ratings plummeted again after the glow wore off.
Imagine that: Despite rock-bottom unpopularity, the American people looked past Carter’s ineptitude and rallied around its Olympic team. And I don’t recall any of those athletes bad-mouthing Carter; indeed, if anything, they ripped the Soviet Union for its then-recent 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. (Kadlac says the Cold War “made it easy” to root for the Americans.)
Can you imagine the vitriol against Trump if he did what Carter did shortly after the ’80 Winter Games — prevent U.S. (and other countries’) athletes from competing in that summer’s Olympic games?
Ironically, 1979 also was the year in which Iranians stormed the American embassy in Tehran, and held 50-plus hostages for over a year. (Carter’s continued inaction, and then failed rescue attempt, largely contributed to his low approval.) Then, Americans were united in their anger at Iran.
Forty-seven years later, a U.S. president is attempting to do something about the regime that has since been responsible for myriad acts of terror all over the world, but now it’s a case of “military adventurism.”
Today’s highly polarized political environment and especially outlier candidate Trump are the reason articles like Kadlac’s appear in press in the first place. Ditto (profane) critical remarks from various athletes like those from Megan Rapinoe, which the mainstream media encourage. (Rapinoe’s 2019 Women’s World Cup squad is the only U.S. national team I rooted against due to her and her teammates’ big mouths and egos.)
Cases like Colin Kaepernick or, more recently, Jaxon Dart differ as they represent a single city in a (well-compensated) professional league.
If you choose to don the red, white, and blue, you should keep the hole under your nose shut about political matters, and you should accept presidential invitations because all Americans are watching.
MORE: UPenn student paper: School caving to Trump admin. over men in women’s sports is ‘fascism’
