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I’ve done a lot of press this week thanks to the absolute shitshow that is the U.S. men’s hockey team. Those links will be at the end of the newsletter.

What a shitty, shitty end to an otherwise pretty great Olympic Games (and by “great, I mean as great as a hypocritical international sports spectacle can be). Watching the U.S. women’s hockey team’s gold medal be overshadowed by the behavior of both the men’s team and the pedophile-in-chief who is using them as political props has been disheartening, to say the least.

As I see it, there are now two distinct (though connected) parts to this story. The first is the locker room phone call from Trump to the men, in which the women's achievement is dismissed and degraded. The misogyny of that moment has been written about extensively, as it should be. As I told Amanda Montei at the Mad Woman newsletter, “Trump's focus on the men's team while also degrading the women's shows that no matter what women achieve, they are still considered second class.”

But the second part is the one we should actually be paying more attention to, because the outrage over the overt misogyny of insulting the women's team is pulling focus and distracting from what’s actually happening. Trump invited both the men’s and women's hockey teams to attend his State of the Union address on Tuesday. The women turned down the invite, citing scheduling conflicts. The men, however, accepted, calling it a “great honor” to get to visit the White House and denying that their attendance was political in any way.

During the SOTU, Trump made several shoutouts to the men, holding them up as the pride of the United States and using them to stoke a patriotic reaction. He said he would be giving goalie Connor Hellebuyck the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And in participating in this spectacle, the U.S. men have become props in the entire charade, allowing themselves to be used as political pawns in Trump’s authoritarian playbook.

This is what’s known as sportswashing, and it's a well-known tactic of authoritarian regimes. With all the attention on the atrocities that Trump’s administration is committing—the disappearing, kidnapping, and murder of immigrants; the genocide of trans Americans; the coverup of an international pedophila ring—Trump is distracting the masses. He is capitalizing on the feelings of patriotism and national pride that the Olympics drum up in citizens. He is using the men’s team as a contrast to the “losers" like U.S. skier Hunter Hess, who spoke critically of his administration. These hockey men are the REAL Americans, the ones we should be proud of.

And this is all occurring in the buildup to the U.S. hosting the World Cup later this year (as the Trump administration restricts visa access to 39 countries), as well as the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. You know, the same Olympic Committee that has declined to remove Casey Wasserman as Chairperson despite his appearance in the Epstein Files. (If you want to follow the mess and human rights violations in real time, I highly recommend Alissa Walker’s Torched newsletter, all about LA's megaevents era.)

He is following in the footsteps of Russia (the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics), China (the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics), and Nazi Germany (the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics), in using the “soft power” of hosting cultural events on an international stage to whitewash the government’s misdeeds. In the 2010s, Russia hosted a variety of mega sporting events for this reason; in addition to the Sochi Winter Games, there was the 2013 Summer Universiade in Kazan and the 2018 FIFA men’s World Cup. And then, in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 Olympics, Russia invaded Crimea. The military aggression and war crimes were largely overshadowed by the narrative of winter sports in Sochi that year.

Don’t be fooled, and don’t look away.