Sports Culture War State of the Union

The Blue Veto vs. the Red Veto

Perhaps you’ve heard, both American Olympic hockey teams took gold at Canada’s expense. The men’s team appears to love Donald Trump absent qualification whereas the women’s team has declined his invitation to the State of the Union address. There’s a controversy over Trump making a joke to the men’s team about how he’d get impeached if he didn’t invite the victorious women. I’ve little insight into whether that factored into the women declining, but it’s funny to see the Trump-averse angry over the aside. “The evil man didn’t enthusiastically extend an invite we’d want rejected,” is very, “The food is terrible, and such small portions!” But that’s the Internet.

The men’s team celebrated gold with FBI Director Kash Patel, there for some reason, pounding beers as all belted out Toby Keith’s, “Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American).” On Tuesday, the liberal hockey lovin’ guys on Le Batard, God love them, surmised that Team USA’s men might simply be naive as to how attending Trump’s SOTU speech comes off as controversial. It’s not that their beloved hockey players share a worldview with the hated out group, no. This was some accident perhaps, born out of social ignorance maybe.

Well I’d posit, and call me crazy, that the HOCKEY PLAYERS who hopped on a call with Trump and sang, “'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way”…just be might be rightist Trump lovers. And I say that descriptively rather than pejoratively. Just because we watch strangers on the TV and experience feelings about them doesn’t mean they mirror our politics. Athletes in violent sports don’t typically share the worldview of the tech workers in my neighborhood. America is a rich and vast tapestry of different types.

Toby Keith’s 9/11 anthem came out in 2002, and from my coastal teenager perspective, I very much looked down on it. After the Iraq War, the song stood out as a monument to when cooler heads certainly did not prevail and a lot of regrettable damage was heedlessly done in the name of ass kicking Uncle Sam. It blows my mind that, more than two decades later, it’s a popular TikTok diddy for a certain segment of young people (Keith’s presence looked fairly pronounced in the 2024 election celebration videos from SEC schools).

In 2025, “Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue” rose to 25 on the 2025 Billboard Top 100 chart, which is quite a feat for an especially anachronistic song. If you attribute my “anachronistic” framing to coastal elitism, just know that Toby Keith himself appeared to agree as recently as 2021. Back then, he put out an elegiac nostalgia ode titled, “Happy Birthday America.”

Seems like everybody's pissin'
On the red, white, and blue
Happy birthday, America
Whatever's left of you

Keith sang like a man who’d lost his country. Four years later, his 2002 hit became the anthem for the nationally ascendant. It had apparently been long enough. In our social media era stuck culture, we perhaps generate fewer trends than we recycle. The anachronistic old just eventually becomes the subversive new. And sports reflect the changing of that guard. That culture has changed again, by the way.

The Blue Veto

I wrote a 2023 essay titled, “Why the Culture War Died in Sports.” Pre Trump Term 2 but post Elon Twitter, that was the moment as I saw it. A fever had broken and sports media had suddenly shifted away from politics.

The most obvious cause of depoliticization in sports media (and elsewhere) is that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Just as important, perhaps, is that Joe Biden won it. Biden’s presidency can be debated, but I think few would contest his status as a less-than-inspiring figure, in both positive and negative directions. The United States has gone from an absolute lightning rod at the top, hotly despised by much of the educated classes, to a fading presence, whose lack of capacity makes that influential cohort merely feel uneasy.

It’s all contributed to something between a malaise and a return to normalcy. Joe is not doing well in the polls, but you expect any team that wins a championship to attend a White House ceremony. The powers that be consider Biden both legitimate and disappointing, a combination that sidelines his presence in favor of business as usual. Biden may be failing as a president, but just by existing, he’s made good on the value proposition of turning down the temperature on our politics. That part, at least, has gone well.

Then Trump won again and suddenly athletes were showing more affiliation with the president than we’d seen in 2016. Back then, elite figures who’d initially signaled Trump support were mostly cowed by an adversarial media presence that brought more bite.

You’d see similar scenarios play out with the football coaches and NFL players who endorsed Trump. In some form or fashion, under heavy media pressure, they’d either delete or publicly denounce their own positions. The grizzled football men mostly looked confused as they sputtered their retractions. Since when am I not allowed to have a political opinion?

The rise of social media meant that the nerds were in charge. They were now the cultural arbiters and enforcers, even over their natural enemies, the jocks. It was a far different setup from the old days, back when that jock world was used as a massive battering ram against the wants of lefty intellectuals.

While Trump now polls lower than he did in his first term, prominent citizens are paradoxically more willing to appear alongside him than back in 2016-2020. The famous conservatives are aware of potential backlash, like the sort Team USA men are receiving, but they seem more prone to shrugging it off than in pre Covid times. I mostly attribute this increased willingness to two overlapping occurrences: The decline of corporate media, and purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. Back in the day, The Media turning on you felt dangerous, a prelude to the end of your career as someone despised by history. These days, it more often can be regarded as annoying.

Maybe there should be a lesson in all this. Successfully shaming influencers into hiding their political affiliation didn’t end Trump. Now that so called influencers are more frequently pro Trump, he’s less popular than ever. I’d advise that anti-Trump people then calm down and let college football podcaster Josh Pate or whoever do their fluffy cameos with the president absent much incident. It doesn’t matter much. It won’t determine whether Trump’s presidency ends in shame. Relax.

But I cannot control the culture or undermine the allure of the Blue Veto. And what is the “Blue Veto”?