Donald Trump was not at the White House when the military he commands began bombing Iran over the weekend. He was at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Florida, following the action from a makeshift situation room apparently built from those curtains that you can wheel away. That’s also where he was when American forces kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife a few weeks earlier.
On Thursday, however, Trump will be at the White House for the really important business – namely, receiving Inter Miami as winners of the 2025 MLS Cup.
It’s unclear whether the Herons will be joined by Lionel Messi, per the Athletic’s reportingbut with or without him, the ceremony will take place at a fraught time, even by Trump’s standards. Only last week, the president yukked it up with most of the Olympic men’s hockey team – five out of the team’s players chose to stay away – and vaporized the goodwill that team had earned with its gold medal.
The women’s hockey team, gilded by the same medals, did not attend the event after Trump made a sexist joke about them to the men’s team, in which he suggested that he was only inviting them because of woke, or something.
The mere act of accepting the traditional White House invitation for a team that has won a US domestic league or major international competition makes a statement in an era where this once-bipartisan ritual is no longer a formality – in the sense of the word that it is both a formal and routine act.
In this second Trump term, as in the first, the decision of whether to visit the White House is a fraught political decision forced on athletes who did not seek it out but were thrust into this conundrum by doing the thing they most want to do: winning something.
If they’re not Trump supporters, players must make what can feel like a lose-lose decision. If they go, they are effectively condoning and validating a seemingly lawless presidency with their presence. Refusing to go is akin to taking a stand against the incumbent government and positioning themselves as anti-Trump public figures, inviting all of the attendant hubbub, backlash, and threats.
Erstwhile US women’s national team star Megan Rapinoe did not lack in moral clarity when the question was put to her ahead of the 2019 Women’s World Cup. “I’m not going to the fucking White House,” she said in an offhanded comment during a photoshoot. And even though they won a second straight World Cup, the women didn’t visit the White House – whereas they had gone to see President Barack Obama after their victory in 2015. (They also weren’t invited by Trump, it should be pointed out.)
The Golden State Warriors visited the White House before and after the first Trump presidency, during the administrations of Obama and Joe Biden, but didn’t go while the 45th president was in office, despite winning the NBA championship twice during his first term.
Of the recent champions of the major American leagues, the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles went, but did so absent a dozen players headlined by stars Jalen Hurts, AJ Brown and DeVonta Smith. The NHL’s Florida Panthers have been twice in 12 months, most recently in mid-January. Yet there is no word on whether the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, who won their title just five days after the Panthers did, will go. The Thunder did visit the White House for a tour and a screening in 2022 when Joe Biden was president, even though they weren’t the league’s champions. The three-time WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces went under Biden in 2023 and 2024 but have no apparent plans to go under Trump after winning it all in 2025. The Los Angeles Dodgers plan to go despite protests from sections of their fanbase.
Inter Miami, obviously, are going. So now they must decide how to navigate the thing most American sports franchises will go to enormous lengths to avoid wading into: a political quagmire.
That nobody has figured out how to delicately sidestep this predictable and persistent issue is a failure on the part of sports administrators and executives. Instead of either handling this quietly in some backroom or displaying moral leadership and taking a public stance on behalf of their whole club, thus shielding their players from the inevitable fallout, they leave them to take sides in an ideological battle they may have no interest in joining.
It’s a terrible position to put athletes in, coming, as it does, with the non-zero chance that they will serve as the backdrop to some bigoted rant or burst of geopolitical blustering – or, worse, get dragged into some culture-war non-issue.
And yet the players alone will be left to answer for these decisions.
Which is all to say that Messi and his teammates must work out whether they want pictures of themselves shaking Trump’s hand, gamely smiling besides the president, to turn up in their image searches in perpetuity.
No matter what they do, meaning will be attached to it.
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Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.
