President Donald Trump had fun posing for photo-ops with the U.S. Men's Hockey Team after their Olympic Win — and the players, after going out of their way to pump up the president and denigrate the accomplishment of the women's team, ultimately got nothing out of it but controversy and bad PR, Alex Kirshner wrote for Slate on Friday.
The most obvious example is Brady Tkachuk, who laughed along with Trump belittling the women's team, and then faced sharp questions from the media about why he didn't stand up for his female counterparts, and also what he thinks of a MAGA AI video that emerged of himself boasting that in the win over Canada, they taught those "maple syrup-eating f---s" a lesson. He was clearly uncomfortable and wanted the controversy to go away.
"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," wrote Kirshner. "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."
The upshot, Kirshner wrote, is that the 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.
"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," wrote Kirshner. "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."
Ultimately, he concluded, "Trump has gotten his photo ops and had the chance to hang out not just with cool athletes, but winners," and "paid nothing for this experience ... the only other group left holding a bill is the players."
