Shortly after JD Vance arrived in Milan last week, the vice president took the opportunity to tell U.S. athletes participating in the Olympics that the competition “is one of the few things that unites the entire country.”
In hindsight, maybe “entire” was overstating matters.
The day after Vance made the comments, he was booed during the opening ceremony. The same day, Olympic skier Hunter Hess shared some candid comments about recent developments in the United States.
“I think it brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now,” Hess, a two-time X Games bronze medalist, said during a news conference on Friday. “There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of, and I think a lot of people aren’t. I think, for me, it’s more I’m representing my, like, friends and family back home, the people that represented it before me, all the things that I believe are good about the U.S.”
Hess added that “just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.”
On Saturday morning, roughly 48 hours after his vice president said the Olympics are “one of the few things that unites the entire country,” Donald Trump decided to step all over Vance’s line. MS NOW reported:
President Donald Trump called U.S. Olympian Hunter Hess a ‘real loser’ Sunday in response to the freestyle skier’s Friday remark that representing the United States in the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy is leaving him with ‘mixed emotions.’ In addition to calling Hess a ‘loser,’ Trump wrote on social media that the 27-year-old ‘shouldn’t have tried out’ for Team U.S.A.
For good measure, the Republican added in his online statement that he finds it “very hard to root for someone like this.”
He was, of course, referring to one of the Olympic athletes from his own country.
There’s also some recent history to keep in mind. When the United States’ women’s soccer team lost to Sweden in a preliminary round in the 2021 Games, for example, American fans were naturally disappointed. Trump was not.
Not long after the setback, the Republican headlined an event in Arizona where he publicly mocked his own country’s Olympic athletes. “Wokeism makes you lose,” Trump said at the gathering, adding, “The U.S. women’s soccer team is a very good example of what’s going on.”
As the Republican celebrated the loss — he even said “Americans were happy” to see the team lose — the conservative audience loudly booed the athletes.
And while it’s true that booing is a common part of sports, the Olympics tends to inspire at least some modicum of patriotism, with American fans cheering on American athletes representing the United States at the international games.
But Trump didn’t quite see it that way.
Two weeks later, after the women’s soccer team won a bronze medal match in Tokyo, Trump kept going. “If our soccer team, headed by a radical group of Leftist Maniacs, wasn’t woke, they would have won the Gold Medal instead of the Bronze. Woke means you lose, everything that is woke goes bad, and our soccer team certainly has,” he wrote.
The Republican added that he wanted to see athletes who agree with him replace “the wokesters” in future games.
The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, “It is exceptionally rare for a sitting president of the U.S. to criticize a member of the country’s Olympic team.”
That’s true, although with the incumbent president, such norms have been erased.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
