Star forward Megan Rapinoe of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team on Friday hit back at former President Donald Trump for his vicious attack on the American athletes for being “woke” and winning a bronze medal at the Olympics instead of gold.
Rapinoe appeared more disappointed in Trump than angry at him.
“It’s a real sad dig into an old bag,” the athlete told Nexstar Media Wire reporter Jack Doles of Trump’s attack on Thursday. “I’m just like, ‘You’re rooting for people to do bad?’ Yikes.”
The “bad” comment was evidently a reference to Trump’s criticism that the women on the team are “woke” — politically enlightened — and that he therefore expected, and apparently hoped, they would perform poorly.
Trump called the American players both “woke” and “bad,” and said they should be replaced by “patriots.”
“Woke means you lose, everything that is woke goes bad, and our soccer team certainly has,” Trump said in a statement that was posted by paid aide Liz Harrington on Twitter, which is failing to enforce its lifetime “ban” on the former president.
“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,” he claimed.
Trump singled out Rapinoe, whom he called “the woman with the purple hair [who] played terribly and spends too much time thinking about Radical Left politics and not doing her job!”
Trump apparently doesn’t have a clue about how soccer is played. In the U.S. team’s face-off with Australia Thursday, Rapinoe delivered a stunning, corner-kick “Olimpico” goal deep into the net. The United States won that game 4-3, netting a bronze medal in the process. Rapinoe scored two of the team’s four goals.
An Olimpico goal is usually considered a once-in-a-lifetime feat. But it was the second time that Rapinoe wowed fans with the stunner — and at an Olympics, no less. She made the same spectacular corner kick goal in 2012, in London, when the team won gold.
Even if America’s former leader wasn’t impressed (or else wasn’t knowledgeable enough to understand what happened), Rapinoe and millions of fans were proud of the U.S. team.
“We didn’t have the tournament we wanted to,” Rapinoe admitted to Doles. But “the performance we had in the last game, that’s who we want to be and that’s who we are,” she added matter-of-factly.
The relationship between Trump and the team has long been strained, particularly when it comes to Rapinoe, who last year blasted Trump as a “white nationalist.” Asked in 2019 about the possibility that the White House might invite the team for a visit, prior to their FIFA Women’s World Cup victory that year, Rapinoe let it be known: “I’m not going to the fucking White House.”