Donald Trump got what he wanted out of the U.S. men’s hockey team.
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On Sunday, Brady Tkachuk won an Olympic gold medal in Milan when the U.S. beat out Canada in the men’s hockey final. On Tuesday, he was grinning and gripping in the Oval Office, feted by Donald Trump, along with most of his teammates. That evening, Trump gave the team a grand entrance in the middle of the State of the Union address, holding them up as an emblem of American victory. Both houses of Congress gave them an ovation.
By Thursday, Tkachuk was finishing up a morning skate in Ontario, where he is the captain of Canada’s most boring NHL franchise, the Ottawa Senators. As part of the NHL’s standard media protocols, he was then required to answer questions from the assembled media who wanted to know his thoughts on a few things: One, why did Tkachuk and the bulk of the American team laugh heartily when Trump belittled the gold medal–winning U.S. women’s hockey team? (Trump had explained to the men that he’d have to also invite the women to D.C. so that he would not get impeached.) And, two, how did the Ottawa captain feel about the White House posting an A.I.-generated video on its TikTok account that purported to show Tkachuk antagonizing the country where he works? “They booed our national anthem, so I had to come out and teach those maple syrup–eating fucks a lesson,” Tkachuk “says” in the video. “Canada, we own you, little bro.” This video had come out shortly after the game, before the team went to D.C., and now Tkachuk was being asked to talk about all of it.
Tkachuk was decidedly having a less fun time now. He didn’t have much of an answer about the laughter over the idea of inviting the women’s team to the White House, saying Trump’s dig came at “a whirlwind of a moment.” Tkachuk also batted away people who thought they’d overheard him on a (real) locker room video screaming “close the northern border” —he said it wasn’t his voice and that he wouldn’t say that.
“I don’t know how that took a storm on its own when I give everything I have here,” he told the Canadian press. In a bit of black comedy, Tkachuk had to explain that the White House A.I. video, which has more than 10 million views on TikTok alone, is a fake: “Well, it’s clearly fake, because it’s not my voice, not my lips moving. I’m not in control of any of those accounts. I know that those words would never come out of my mouth. So, I can’t do anything about it.” He did not apologize for laughing at Trump’s misogyny.
The Tkachuk affair is the sign that it’s time to stop talking about this story—not because it’s not important but because, finally, the most naive people involved in this saga have been taken to task over it. Tkachuk was the most sad-sack of these cases, but nearly every member of the American team has had to submit to a session of meddling questions about their last few days as part of Trump’s political project. A small number of them offered medium-grade apologies (not always including the word “sorry”) for the men’s team joining Trump in making fun of the women’s team. These players have learned what all who lend their credibility to Donald Trump eventually learn: They do not get to decide how he uses them or what happens to their reputations when he does.
Are the players angry that Trump has used them? Probably not. No team is a monolith, but hockey culture is extremely small-C conservative, whether you’re a high school player going nowhere (as I once was) or an NHLer. To the limited extent that we have data on American NHL players, Republicans outnumber Democrats by multiples. It would be surprising if that ideological dynamic stopped altogether at the northern border. Wayne Gretzky, a Canadian and the best player ever, is a Trump club frequenter who hasn’t mustered a negative word about his golf buddy’s threats to annex his homeland. The Great One has treated backlash to his both-sides act as hysteria. He shares that tendency with America’s overtime hero from the gold medal game. Jack Hughes, talking about Trump’s comments about the women’s team, said that “people are so negative about things” without addressing the subject matter. Teammate Tage Thompson put on a MAGA hat and then snapped into a mode of patriotic neutrality, explaining that he loves Jesus and is proud to be an American. All of this sounds evasive but is probably sincere; a real part of hockey culture is the belief that it’s impossible for a hockey player to be political.
The team would have still faced some backlash if all it had done was go to the White House. Those news cycles were a feature of Trump’s first term and have remained one in his second. It was an NHL team, the Pittsburgh Penguins, that made the first visit to see Trump after he’d disinvited the mostly Black Golden State Warriors from the White House in 2017. But the gold-medal hockey players would not have found themselves in this current all-time culture-war shitstorm if they, and their team leadership, hadn’t really pushed it.
There were no players’ families in videos of the team’s locker room celebration, but there was FBI director and hockey nut Kash Patel, basically having a Make-a-Wish day on the taxpayer dime. Thank American general manager Bill Guerin for inviting Patel, apparently the only outsider in the world worthy of joining such a sacred celebration. Patel, a social media influencer who rose to power by parroting Trump’s deranged lies about the 2020 election, was on camera slamming beers with the team instead of finding Savannah Guthrie’s mother or releasing federal files about his boss being accused of sexually assaulting a teenager. Guerin and most of the American players probably think this whole news cycle has been unfair from the start, but this entire thing is their fault: Asking the internet not to break out into chaos over this FBI director having this experience on all of our dime is like asking fire not to be hot.
Meanwhile, Patel made the stories about the team’s celebration all about him—at least until Trump’s call with the team spread widely. The American players have every right to love Trump, or to support his efforts to capitalize on their success even if they don’t care much about the guy himself. But to be surprised that people were mad about the ordeal is hilarious. These players learned 20 minutes ago that not everyone views hockey players as unconditionally neutral all the time—but particularly not when they wrap themselves around a massively unpopular president who’s in the news every day for his intimate friendship with the world’s most notorious pedophile. This must have been like learning about gravity.
Trump causing blowback for his own loyalists is the oldest game in his book, one that would-be hanging victim Mike Pence and countless other underlings know well. What his social media staffers did to Brady Tkachuk was among his administration’s most on-the-nose versions. Trump’s people literally put words in Tkachuk’s mouth, not knowing or not caring that they were wildly inconvenient (fake) words for the captain of a Canadian NHL team. Tkachuk is the logical endpoint of Trump’s capacity to turn people into props.
In these ceaselessly stupid few days, the system has worked. Trump has gotten his photo ops and had the chance to hang out not just with cool athletes, but winners. Patel got to pretend that the best hockey players in the world are his real friends. The athletes got to see the Oval Office and take pictures with the most powerful person alive. Trump paid nothing for this experience, and whatever Patel’s experience cost, the taxpayers covered it. The only other group left holding a bill is the players.
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