US Women's Soccer Star Speaks Out About White House Visit Before Playing a Single World Cup Game
Continuing a bizarre, and apparently one-sided, feud with Donald Trump, another U.S. women’s soccer star has come out firing against the president.
While Trump has remained virtually silent on anything related to women’s soccer, Team USA star Megan Rapinoe has been a frequent and vocal critic of the current administration.
In mid-May, Rapinoe vowed to never put her hand over her heart or sing the national anthem as a protest against the president.
“So it’s kind of a good ‘F you’ to any sort of inequality or bad sentiments that the (Trump) administration might have towards people who don’t look exactly like him. Which, God help us if we all looked like him. Scary. Really scary. Ahh, disturbing,” Rapinoe told Yahoo Sports.
She called Trump “sexist,” “misogynistic,” “small-minded,” “racist” and “not a good person.”
Now Rapinoe’s teammate and Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model Alex Morgan is also attacking the president.
In an interview published Thursday by Time magazine, Morgan made the declaration that she would decline a White House invite should Team USA win the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
“I don’t stand for a lot of things the current office stands for,” she said.
TIME’s new cover: “You have to take a stand.” Soccer phenom @alexmorgan13 wants the respect—and money—female players deserve https://t.co/yrhFnTipLn pic.twitter.com/7L80TILYao
— TIME (@TIME) May 23, 2019
According to Time, Morgan has a particular issue with her belief that the Trump administration is separating migrant families at the nation’s southern border.
Of note, her husband, Los Angeles Galaxy player Servando Carrasco, was born in the United States but grew up in Mexico and has family there.
Morgan is well within her rights to critique the government. But shouldn’t she wait until after her team wins and Trump invites them to the White House before she turns him down?
There are other problems with what she said aside from how presumptuous it was.
Much like Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James before her, Morgan sees no issue with mixing sports and politics despite droves of sports fans clearly not wanting it.
“We don’t have to be put in this little box,” she told Time. “There’s the narrative that’s been said hundreds of times about any sort of athlete who’s spoken out politically. ‘Stick to sports.’
“We’re much more than that, OK?”
She has fallen into the infuriating habit of an athlete thinking that a glorified photo op at the White House is somehow an effective platform for any sort of social reform. Simply put, it’s not.
Her criticisms of Trump, along with Rapinoe’s, paint a picture of a U.S. national team that’s more focused on divisive politics than representing the country in the World Cup.
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