After a Winter Olympic Video games of athletes celebrating one another as a lot as they did profitable, the response from the Trump administration is equal elements disheartening and gross.
These are people who find themselves functionally incapable of seeing the Olympics as something however a chance to show their xenophobic loathing of different international locations and to rejoice victory as a type of violent domination.
Briefly, the Trump group merely didn’t perceive something about these Olympics.
Maybe the highest-profile instance of this was the diminutive FBI Director Kash Patel partying with the U.S. males’s hockey group in your dime.
Or perhaps it’s that, after the lads’s hockey group beat Canada for the gold, the official White Home X account posted an image—which we are able to all safely assume is AI slop—of a bald eagle attacking a Canadian goose on a frozen lake. Beating Canada in a hockey recreation apparently means we now have subjugated all the nation? Terrific.
Or maybe it’s the AI slop video of President Donald Trump—the most important, most pathetic starfucker there ever was—inserting himself into the sport so he might punch a Canadian hockey participant.
This conduct can be disgusting at any time, nevertheless it’s particularly jarring after an Olympics the place the athletes themselves made aware choices to point out take care of one another—together with their rivals.
Nowhere was this clearer than in determine skating, the place U.S. skaters banded collectively to cheer different international locations’ skaters on, with Ilia Malinin taking time to congratulate Mikhail Shaidorov for his gold medal—even after Malinin’s didn’t place in any respect for his free skate efficiency.
And after Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto was inundated with reporters forcing cameras in her face, she realized that she misplaced the gold to U.S. skater Alysa Liu. Liu’s teammate, Amber Glenn, rushed to consolation Sakamoto, telling one reporter to cease making an attempt to movie her crying.
However it wasn’t simply determine skaters.
After Australian snowboarder Valentino Guseli unexpectedly made it into the finals of the large air competitors, Swiss snowboarder Jonas Hasler carried Guseli round on his shoulders in celebration.
And we additionally had been handled to the adorableness of “Dads Podium,” the place all three twin moguls winners had been joined by their companions and younger youngsters.
It additionally wasn’t simply athletes.
The closing ceremony highlighted how essential togetherness was to the video games, with Worldwide Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry telling athletes in her last remarks, “You confirmed us that the Olympic Video games are a spot for everybody. A spot the place sport brings us collectively.”
She additionally thanked the Italian folks for his or her graciousness towards the athletes.
“You celebrated your champions and also you cheered for athletes of each nation, exhibiting that zeal and respect can dwell aspect by aspect,” Coventry mentioned.
The notion that folks can take care of one another—at the same time as sports activities rivals—and that connection issues greater than jingoism and xenophobia is totally international to folks like Trump. The one factor he is aware of the right way to rejoice is the subjugation of others.
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Sadly, it appears just like the U.S. males’s hockey group is completely down for this type of factor, eagerly accepting Trump’s invitation to his State of the Union deal with on Tuesday.
The plans for it already sound gross, with Home Speaker Mike Johnson making an attempt to interrupt the Home rule that claims that no particular friends are allowed on the ground. He says he’s “making an attempt to work out logistics to see if there’s some solution to maybe get them into the gallery and the doorways, wave and obtain the applause they’re due.”
Proposing to interrupt legislative guidelines to do some xenophobic screaming about AMERICA is so on model for this administration that it feels just like the writers’ room for this season is getting lazy.
However sadly, it’s actual. Not less than the remainder of us can fall again on our reminiscences of what it appears like when athletes come collectively and take care of one another.
