Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump wants to subjugate every institution that could possibly be a source of opposition to him. So far he has gotten law firms, media companies, and universities to obey him, but he is far from finished. His next target could be a sports league—specifically, the WNBA.
The WNBA is the most popular women's sports league. It is also very anti-MAGA. Most leagues try to be nonpartisan because they don't want to drive away either Democrats or Republicans. Apparently the WNBA has done some polls and focus groups and discovered that most of its fans are Democrats, so they have nothing to lose by being anti-MAGA. Back as far as 2020, players wore "Black Lives Matter" warmups and jerseys with the name of Breonna Taylor, a victim of police violence. MLB and NFL players don't do that en masse. Nowadays, the WNBA partners with Planned Parenthood and GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ youth organization.
To Donald Trump, this is intolerable and it is putting the league on a collision course with him. This is not a huge surprise since the league is dominated by Black women, many of them queer Black women. Some people who do not like this have taken to throwing green sex toys on the court as a kind of statement of some sort. It has become a regular occurrence. Trump has egged them on. Donald Trump Jr. even posted this fake image.
Note that all but one of the players shown are Black. The image got over 100,000 likes. Also many variations of this comment: "So funny! Now RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES."
The problem Trump has is finding leverage against the WNBA. The teams don't need access to federal courtrooms, and don't have government grants that can be arbitrarily canceled. They don't need a steady stream of full-freight-paying foreign students to pay the bills. It is nearly impossible to find grounds for a lawsuit that would last 30 seconds after the judge read the suit. One "promising" tactic (for Trump) seems to be getting allies and underlings trying to throw in some all-American racism. The biggest star in the league is Caitlin Clark, a straight white woman in a sea of gay Black women. The late Charlie Kirk claimed that Clark is a victim of anti-white racial discrimination. Kirk said: "Everyone knows Caitlin Clark is being targeted by Black women because she is white." This goes over well with Trump's base, which believes everyone discriminates against white people, and this is just a blatant example.
Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN), who represents the home state of Clark's team, the Indiana Fever, piled on. He has demanded answers about why the WNBA has been "a league that refuses to hold hostile players accountable and enforce their own rules." Other MAGAworld people, like Sean McLean, have said that if the WNBA doesn't clean up its act, the administration should do it. He and some other allies see a parallel with Trump's attacks on Columbia and Harvard for nominally allowing antisemitism to run unchecked. So why not go after the WNBA for allowing the (alleged) racism of queer Black players against the poor straight white victim Clark. OK, Clark is not poor after having just signed a $28 million deal with Nike. And she hasn't actually asked anyone for help, and has made clear she believes that nothing out-of-bounds has happened to her. But coming to the rescue of a not-so-poor white woman who some people think is a victim fits in well with Trump's base, many of whom see themselves as victims, too. (V)