Who’s Honoring Whom?

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

 

If you want to know how open someone is to still voting Republican in 2026, ask them how they feel about the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team attending last night’s State of the Union address.

 

It’s not a perfect proxy, as we’ll see, but it’s apt to tell you something about how comfortable that person is with [gestures broadly] all this.

 

Fresh off their kegger with the director of the FBI, the players made a dramatic entrance during the president’s speech wearing their gold medals, the first for Team USA in men’s hockey since the “Miracle on Ice” Olympics of 1980. Their appearance in the House chamber drew cheers from both parties, one of the few moments in a nearly two-hour(!) “weave” to do so.

 

For a few precious minutes, Americans put aside their differences over questions like “Is being ruled by a corrupt Caesar with ‘dark triad’ psychological problems preferable to James Madison’s vision?” and came together to bask in athletic glory.

 

The president did the right thing by inviting them. It would have been political malpractice if he hadn’t. When you’re rocking a 36 percent approval rating and are handed a gift-wrapped opportunity to leverage the popularity of newly minted national heroes, you grab it and you don’t let go.

 

Even if he hadn’t benefited from their attendance, an invitation would have been appropriate. Sports teams routinely visit the White House to be honored after winning a championship, a tradition that’s continued under Donald Trump. But a team that wins a championship at the Olympics, representing the entire country, in the marquee sport at the Games enjoys an unusual patriotic distinction that deserves special recognition. Offering them an SOTU victory lap was a no-brainer.

 

Which is not to say that the team should have accepted.

 

The same day the president spoke, The Athletic published a piece titled, “The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold—and then lost the room.” By partying with Patel and agreeing to attend Trump’s speech, author Jerry Brewer complained, the players tainted a moment of national unity that should have, and otherwise would have, transcended politics.

 

“Trump, perhaps more than most modern presidents, understands the optics of standing next to winners,” he wrote. “It normalizes him. It softens his cruel instincts and crude jokes, recasting them as locker-room banter. It washes his reputation and reduces the impact of polls that indicate a significant majority of Americans disapprove of his second term. … Team USA’s visibility in Washington functions as an endorsement, whether the players intend it to be or not.”

 

Last night wasn’t a simple case of the president honoring the team. It was a case of the team honoring the president with their presence.

 

There are three schools of thought about that, broadly speaking. Each reflects a different reaction to this question: How legitimate is Trump’s presidency?

 

Three schools.

 

The first school of thought includes everyone from MAGA diehards to normies who don’t pay much attention to politics, a category that I’m guessing includes plenty of twentysomething gold-medal-winning professional hockey players. Insofar as this school has considered the matter at all, it believes Trump’s presidency is as legitimate as any other.

 

Why wouldn’t it be?

 

One might not agree with everything he does, like depicting the first black president as a monkey, but no one agrees with a politician 100 percent of the time. He won the 2024 election fair and square and is the duly elected head of state. So when he does things that heads of state traditionally do, like honoring Olympians, why would anyone boycott apart from the pettiest possible partisan reasons?

 

The type of person who holds this view, I suspect, is the type of person who believes the most objectionable thing Trump has done since returning to office is failing to restore grocery prices to what they were in 2019. He or she has bills to pay, kids to school, and life to live, without the luxury of following the news closely. Many in this school of thought voted for the president two years ago and will vote Republican again if they see the economy moving in the right direction. Because a bad economy doesn’t make a president illegitimate, these people might think, there’s no reason Team USA shouldn’t have attended Trump’s speech.

 

The second school of thought spans the politically conscious center, from Trump-leery Republicans to Democrats who aren’t quite Resistance-pilled. They grasp the legitimacy dilemma at the core of this presidency but, for different reasons, aren’t so disquieted by it that they’d fault a bunch of athletes for accepting a rhetorical high-five from the commander in chief.

 

The legitimacy dilemma is this: Trump is the legitimate president of the United States, but he’s directed his presidential powers toward the illegitimate end of gutting the country’s liberal civic heritage. From unilateral tariffs to waging undeclared wars, from shaking down political enemies to treating the Justice Department as his personal law firm, from sending National Guard troops to occupy American cities to building his own secret police force, he’s done everything he can to supplant the republic with a monarchy.

 

A really sleazy one, too.

 

Members of the second school understand that. But they also understand that life is bigger than politics and must go on even during a rolling constitutional crisis. When Team USA wins gold and the legitimate president pauses for a moment to recognize them, we can and should be able to suspend our alarm for one g-ddamned night to feel good about the country we live in.

 

“One thing the normies are right about is that there’s such a thing as ‘politicizing everything’ and the people who do it are super annoying,” Nate Silver, a sports junkie who’s very much not a Republican, observed this morning. Many swing voters would agree, no doubt. Why should we begrudge a group of hockey players who won gold a well-deserved moment in the sun just because Americans were stupid enough to reelect Donald Trump?

 

When I said earlier that one’s feelings about the team attending the speech aren’t a perfect proxy for one’s willingness to vote Republican, it’s this second school I was thinking of. Nate Silver won’t be voting GOP this fall, I’m reasonably sure, nor will many other left-leaning hockey fans who hate the administration but enjoyed the players’ SOTU cameo—possibly the only reason some tuned in to watch, in fact.

 

But “stop politicizing everything!” will also assuredly be the preferred take on this episode among anti-anti-Trump conservatives who have been looking for, and reliably finding, excuses to continue supporting the GOP since 2015 despite their misgivings about the president. It can’t be otherwise: Team USA’s willingness to swallow any moral qualms it might have about Trump and associate with him mirrors Reaganite partisans’ own willingness to do so. This sort of person will insist that boycotting an event like this one, in which the president aimed to do nothing more than congratulate the team on behalf of the nation, would have been—and could only have been understood as—disgustingly “political.”

 

But that isn’t true. Which brings us to the third school of thought, those who believe the illegitimacy of Trump’s ambitions should inform interactions with him even when he’s carrying out the legitimate duties of his office.

 

An illegitimate president.

 

The case against the president is a civic one, not a “political” one.

 

Politics relates to policy. I’m sure there are Resistance types who, if asked why they think Team USA should have boycotted the State of the Union, would answer in prosaic political terms—that is, due to some policy difference they have with the administration. Trump didn’t extend the Obamacare subsidies. Trump cut taxes for the rich in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Trump isn’t an “ally” to the LGBT community.

 

Those aren’t the grounds I’d cite to defend a boycott, though. What makes Trump illegitimate isn’t his views on taxation or “wokeness.” What makes him illegitimate is that he put his picture on the Justice Department.

 

He’s an unabashed autocrat. Last night he told members of Congress to their faces that he won’t need their permission for the new tariffs he ordered following last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling even though the law plainly requires it.

 

He treats his opponents as enemies, including some U.S. Olympians. At one point during his speech, while people in the first two schools of thought I mentioned wheezed about a hockey kumbaya moment at the SOTU, Trump blithely assured the tens of millions of Americans watching that Democrats “wanna cheat. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”

 

When he targets Democratic jurisdictions for military or paramilitary occupations while conspicuously exempting ones where Republicans have some electoral interest, that’s not a “political” problem. It’s a civic perversion by a postliberal regime that wants to dominate and subjugate its opponents the way a victorious army might occupy conquered territory.

 

To round things off, he engages in graft that’s as preposterously blatant as it is preposterously huge. Team USA might have told itself that it was attending an official state function last night, not a Trump political event, but the president himself has never perceived a distinction between his official duties and his personal interests. (That’s why he was impeached in 2019.) He used his executive powers to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, for cripes sake.

 

No other president in our lifetime has been as corrupt, as vicious, and as authoritarian. So why would the players of Team USA honor him with their attendance—let alone do him the favor of swinging by the Oval Office beforehand to let him try on a gold medal?

 

“It’s unfair to expect twentysomething hockey stars to know about the things he’s done, let alone to have firm opinions about it,” you might answer.

 

Is it?

 

Five players from the team didn’t attend last night. They didn’t say why, but it’s notable that three were born in the ICE-scorched state of Minnesota while a fourth, Jake Guentzel, was raised there. The entire U.S. women’s hockey team, which also won gold in an overtime thriller over Canada, declined the president’s invitation as well. And Alysa Liu, who won gold in women’s figure skating and became the breakout star of the Games, was nowhere to be found at the Capitol. It’s hard to believe she wasn’t asked to attend and easy to believe she preferred not to.

 

People, especially athletes, are entitled to be apolitical—but as I say, the gravest and most obnoxious episodes of Trump’s second presidency haven’t fundamentally been “political.” Do we really think that the captain of the Ottawa Senators has no opinion about the president threatening Canada repeatedly, to the point where the Canadian military has felt obliged to wargame a U.S. invasion? If he does have an opinion, what was he doing posing with a big toothy grin yesterday next to America’s ersatz Putin?

 

Deflecting civic objections to fascism by caterwauling about “politicization” inescapably, and in some cases deliberately, minimizes the moral force of the liberal critique of Trump. To resent him for tampering with national elections or pitting the military against Americans or turning the Justice Department into a legal hit squad or reducing Congress to something lowlier than the Russian Duma is, supposedly, little different from resenting him for securing the border or supporting gun rights. Fascism is just another partisan policy choice in 2026, you see; expecting guests at the State of the Union to have such a strong aversion to it that attending should trouble their conscience isn’t just unreasonable, it’s petty.

 

When those of us in the third school mutter about boiled frogs, that’s what we’re muttering about. And when Jerry Brewer complains that “Team USA’s visibility in Washington functions as an endorsement,” that’s what he’s complaining about. Attending the SOTU doesn’t mean that the players endorse the president’s policy agenda but it does mean, implicitly, that they believe the way he’s governed is unobjectionable—or at least not meaningfully more objectionable than the way any other politician might govern.

 

In that sense, they’re better representatives of their nation than they might realize. The third school won’t be voting Republican again.