Donald Trump and soccer star Megan Rapinoe have been very public critics of each other for years. Now, after the US soccer team's loss to Sweden at the World Cup, the former president is rubbing it in. "Nice shot Megan," he wrote on Truth Social, referring to her miss on a penalty kick that contributed to the loss. As Politico notes, Trump used the post to go after not just Rapinoe, a strong advocate of LGBT rights, but the entire women's team and "woke" culture in general.
"The 'shocking and totally unexpected' loss by the U.S. Women's Soccer Team to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden," wrote Trump. He accused many of the players of being "openly hostile to America" and declared, in all caps, that "woke equals failure." Newsweek notes that many conservatives also were celebrating the loss online with similar sentiments. "I can't stop laughing," reads a post on the popular right-wing feed of Catturd.
One big-picture take: "The conservative backlash against the USWNT encapsulates a recurring pattern in American society—one where sports serves as an arena for the theater of culture wars," writes Karim Zidan in an assessment at the Guardian. "This spectacle, carefully curated and exploited by political figures like Trump, has magnified existing fault lines and kindled debates surrounding core values." (More US women's soccer stories.)
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