{"id":620601,"date":"2026-02-27T19:39:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T19:39:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/620601\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T19:39:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T19:39:10","slug":"donald-trump-got-what-he-wanted-out-of-the-u-s-mens-hockey-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/620601\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump got what he wanted out of the U.S. men\u2019s hockey team."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, Brady Tkachuk won an Olympic gold medal in Milan when the U.S. beat out Canada in the men\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

By Thursday, Tkachuk was finishing up a morning skate in Ontario, where he is the captain of Canada\u2019s most boring NHL franchise, the Ottawa Senators. As part of the NHL\u2019s 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\u2013winning U.S. women\u2019s hockey team? (Trump had explained to the men that he\u2019d 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<\/a> on its TikTok account that purported to show Tkachuk antagonizing the country where he works? \u201cThey booed our national anthem, so I had to come out and teach those maple syrup\u2013eating fucks a lesson,\u201d Tkachuk \u201csays\u201d in the video. \u201cCanada, we own you, little bro.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Tkachuk was decidedly having a less fun time now. He didn\u2019t have much of an answer<\/a> about the laughter over the idea of inviting the women\u2019s team to the White House, saying Trump\u2019s dig came at \u201ca whirlwind of a moment.\u201d Tkachuk also batted away people who thought they\u2019d overheard him on a (real) locker room video screaming \u201cclose the northern border\u201d \u2014he said it wasn\u2019t his voice and that he wouldn\u2019t say that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know how that took a storm on its own when I give everything I have here,\u201d he told the Canadian press<\/a>. 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: \u201cWell, it\u2019s clearly fake, because it\u2019s not my voice, not my lips moving. I\u2019m not in control of any of those accounts. I know that those words would never come out of my mouth. So, I can\u2019t do anything about it.\u201d He did not apologize for laughing at Trump\u2019s misogyny.<\/p>\n

The Tkachuk affair is the sign that it\u2019s time to stop talking about this story\u2014not because it\u2019s 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\u2019s political project. A small number<\/a> of them offered<\/a> medium-grade apologies<\/a> (not always including the word \u201csorry\u201d) for the men\u2019s team joining Trump in making fun of the women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re 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<\/a>. 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\u2019t mustered a negative word<\/a> about his golf buddy\u2019s threats to annex his homeland. The Great One has treated backlash to his both-sides act as hysteria. He shares that tendency with America\u2019s overtime hero from the gold medal game. Jack Hughes, talking about Trump\u2019s comments about the women\u2019s team, said that \u201cpeople are so negative about things\u201d without addressing the subject matter<\/a>. 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<\/a>. All of this sounds evasive but is probably sincere; a real part of hockey culture is the belief that it\u2019s impossible for a hockey player to be political<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a> after he\u2019d 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\u2019t really pushed it.<\/p>\n

There were no players\u2019 families in videos of the team\u2019s locker room celebration, but there was FBI director and hockey nut Kash Patel, basically having a Make-a-Wish day on the taxpayer dime<\/a>. Thank American general manager Bill Guerin for inviting Patel<\/a>, 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\u2019s deranged lies about the 2020 election, was on camera slamming beers with the team instead of finding Savannah Guthrie\u2019s mother or releasing federal files about his boss being accused of sexually assaulting a teenager<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Alex Kirshner
\n Kash Patel and the U.S. Men\u2019s Hockey Team Deserve Each Other
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Patel made the stories about the team\u2019s celebration all about him\u2014at least until Trump\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2014but particularly not when they wrap themselves around a massively unpopular<\/a> president who\u2019s in the news every day for his intimate friendship with the world\u2019s most notorious pedophile. This must have been like learning about gravity.<\/p>\n

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    Trump causing blowback for his own loyalists is the oldest game in his book, one that would-be hanging victim Mike Pence<\/a> and countless other underlings know well. What his social media staffers did to Brady Tkachuk was among his administration\u2019s most on-the-nose versions. Trump\u2019s people literally put words in Tkachuk\u2019s 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\u2019s capacity to turn people into props.<\/p>\n

    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\u2019s experience cost, the taxpayers covered it. The only other group left holding a bill is the players.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

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