Trump mocks anti-trans WNBA player for being bad at basketball because she’s a girl
If there was anyone left in America who actually believed that Republicans care about the integrity of women’s sports, Donald Trump’s own words should lay that to rest.
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At a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday night, the man who claims to be the biggest protector of women’s and girls’ sports creeped on conservative WNBA player Sophie Cunningham and said she was bad at basketball.
“You have a lot of men wanting to go and watch her. She’s beautiful!” Trump said before complaining that he’s not allowed to say what he just said on camera, in front of an entire crowd.
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“Sophie is a beautiful young woman,” he continued. “You probably wouldn’t mind her on the team, not to help you with points, but to help you with attendance. The attendance would be great.”
This isn’t just one addled octogenarian making a sexist joke about a woman whose career is basketball and whose contribution to political discourse has been attacking trans women athletes as a threat to women and girls.
No, the MAGA crowd loved it. They were laughing at Trump’s joke, which was basically “Thank God Sophie Cunningham is pretty because she sure sucks at basketball!”
And it’s unlikely many of the people laughing had any idea how good Cunningham actually is at basketball. The joke was just that she’s bad at sports because she’s a girl, despite being a professional athlete.
Needless to say, if one were betting on a one-on-one match between Cunningham and Trump, the easy money would be on the former.
The joke wasn’t just a one-off comment either. It’s the basis of the attacks on trans women in sports that has dominated movement conservatism for the past six years: trans women, to conservatives, are men, and cis women just can’t compete against men and will always lose, no matter how good they are at their sport. The idea that high school boys will transition just to win at girls’ sports only makes sense if one assumes that they would be guaranteed to win.
Even when trans women lose – like how trans University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas got fifth place at that infamous 2022 swim meet – the story, for the right, became how she beat everyone else. That’s literally how Rep. James Comer (R-KY) described what happened to Riley Gaines: Lia Thomas won the race, depriving her of a gold medal, even though Thomas and Gaines actually tied for fifth. But Comer just could not fathom a trans woman not beating all the cis women at the race because that would mean acknowledging that sex assigned at birth isn’t the sole factor that determines how good someone is at sports.
Two male NBA players this past summer mocked the WNBA by saying that they would try to get signed by claiming that they’re transgender. The premise of their comments was that if they didn’t get signed to a WNBA team, it would prove that the WNBA is inconsistent in its policy on accepting trans women.
But neither of them ever considered that the WNBA could let them try out and they might just fail to be good enough to get signed.
Trump joked about this earlier this month, saying that former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Dennis Rodman should try out for the WNBA at a rally in Oklahoma. He even pointed out that Rodman is 65 and then, laughing, said, “You think you’d be able to make it in women’s basketball? I don’t know, Dennis, I’m very worried about you.”
A man old enough to get a Social Security check who retired from professional basketball when Bill Clinton was still in the White House must be so much better than all the women in the WNBA that Trump thinks it’s a joke to suggest that he might not make the team.
In Trump’s mind, women only really have value if they can please men. The way he phrased his comments about Cunningham – that there are a lot of “men wanting to go and watch her” – didn’t leave much room for interpretation. The crowds coming to watch her play were presumably men, and the “you” who “probably wouldn’t mind her on the team” was also a man (specifically NFL coach Jon Gruden, according to People). Ditto for the rest of the hypothetical “team” that he was talking about – everyone with agency in Trump’s mind is a man.
Since it’s unlikely Trump could even name another WNBA player, much less have a studied opinion on their relative basketball skills, we can assume that he wasn’t making a statement about how Cunningham herself is bad at basketball due to her past performance; he was imagining a men’s team with Cunningham on it where her job is just to be beautiful, and she would do this better than other women because he thinks she’s more beautiful than they are.
And this is how he talks about a woman who is on his side politically. Women who challenge him at all get called “piggy” or a “slob.”
Trump built his 2024 campaign around attacking trans people and sold it as protecting cis women and girls. His first executive order rolling back trans rights was called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” His executive order banning trans girls and women from sports said in its preamble that it would “protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports.”
Meanwhile, actual fans of women’s sports have spent years mocking the protestors who sometimes show up to games to complain about trans people playing by just asking the supposed defenders of women athletes to even name five women in sports.
And while Trump has a history of blatant misogyny that includes bragging about sexually assaulting women and being held liable by a jury for sexually abusing a woman, he was still able to get 41 million women – or 45% of the estimated 91 million women who voted – to vote for him in 2024.
This is all reminiscent of a legendary tweet from 2015: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
That tweet has become a meme, part of the internet vocabulary for when someone supports something because they think it’ll hurt other people and is then surprised when it hurts them.
Is Cunningham surprised that the president of the United States would speak about her in such a humiliating way in front of a giant crowd? That he would single her out for this treatment for the crime of agreeing with his position on a policy issue?
That’s hard to say, since she hasn’t responded to his comments publicly and likely won’t. Very few people on that side of the aisle are willing to criticize Trump, even as he eats their faces.
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