Trump says he is a savior of women’s sports. His ice hockey joke showed what he really thinks | USA ice hockey team
TLast week, Team USA won gold in women’s and men’s ice hockey at the Winter Olympics, giving Donald Trump a golden opportunity. Instead of grabbing the easy political points, he took the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the boys by inviting them to the State of the Union address. He followed up his offer of a military jet shuttle to Washington DC by lamenting that he should also invite the women’s team. It was a bit of a laugh in the locker room.
The women’s gold medal was a great opportunity for Trump to deliver on his stated commitment to “protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports,” a claim made last February when he sought to position himself as the savior figure of women’s sports. Instead, he decided to make a joke at the Olympic champions’ expense.
But this should not surprise us, because Trump and his allies have never wanted to promote women’s sports. The Trump administration’s alleged commitment to female athletes occupies a rather narrow path. It is the product of the meticulously structured and audience-tested rhetoric of the “Save Women’s Sports” movement, a coordinated and well-funded right-wing campaign that associates women’s sports with its perceived negation: the threat of trans participation. On the right, female athletes only matter in the shadow of the transgender threat. They are just useful pawns for a political project aimed not at advancing women’s sport but at purging transgender people from public life. Instead of focusing on important issues such as funding for women’s sports or celebrating the achievements of exceptional athletes such as the United States women’s hockey team, right-wing activists and advocates have used their political and social cachet to advance a purely negative political agenda. Women’s empowerment through exclusion and nothing else.
This is precisely why a shining moment of female excellence in sports is so easily overlooked by people, like Trump, who view it as a priority. The light of the culture war is a blinding guide that lacks moral foundation. He offers scenarios for speeches, media tours, and congressional testimony, but when a moment deviates even slightly from the established ideological framework, people reveal their already existing beliefs. Trump and the right in general have no real interest in women’s sports, so when they meet with them, as Trump did on Sunday, they revert to the dismal, chauvinistic gender politics that underpin much of the American right.
Trump’s comments are a good example of how the right has managed to develop a narrative about women’s rights that is hollow but resonant because it makes virtually no demands beyond toeing the right line around a handful of cultural signifiers that have been imbued with undue significance. It’s no surprise that the politics of spectacle has been so successful in weaponizing sport, but it remains a political and social travesty that a superficially stigmatized movement around women’s empowerment has so completely failed to elevate the place of women in its chosen field. If Trump wants to empower female athletes in the United States, perhaps he could address the income imbalance between the men’s and women’s ice hockey teams. Or look at why WNBA players are considering union action to get paid fairly.
Men always come first in the right’s pseudo-feminist political agenda. Trump’s locker room showboating is less of a Freudian slip than a summation of the gender politics that have been center stage in the United States over the past seven years. Adherence to a strongly held belief that in many areas of life women are inferior. The logical conclusion of a women’s empowerment project that, in rhetoric and practice, insists on keeping women in the shadows of men.
