Abolish the White House Visit

Does anyone still care about this weird little charade?

Dear readers,

It’s one of those rare times of the year when the sporting world offers up a veritable buffet of athletic spectacles for fans of all stripes: the NFL playoffs are getting underway around the country, the college basketball season is picking up steam, and the Australian Open is well underway in Melbourne.

Amid all this excitement, you’d be forgiven for missing one of the less scintillating sports headlines this week: the Golden State Warriors’ decision to return to the White House for their post-championship soiree, after skipping out on a similar visit during the Trump presidency.

The visit predictably angered the talking heads over at Fox News, but it also raised a basic question: Why do we keep doing this?

Let’s get to it.

-Calder & Ian

P.S. A very happy birthday to Calder, who celebrated his 26th birthday this past week!

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For the past few years, sports fans and center-left politicos alike have yearned for a “return to normal” — to a time before Covid canceled championships, Trump upended American politics, and that combination of the pandemic and political extremism turned life in America upside down. 

This week, we got a glimpse of what that “normal” might look like. As during the Before Times, a Democrat is comfortably ensconced in the White House and the Golden State Warriors are back to racking up NBA titles, which means that America is once again graced with joint Instagram posts of Steph Curry and Joe Biden palling around in Washington.

Curry was in D.C. with the rest of the Warriors franchise for their visit to the White House — a time-honored tradition carried on by America’s title-winning sports teams. The script for these visits is by now pretty standard: The team hands over a custom jersey with the president’s name on the back, the president cracks some dumb jokes that junior staffers cobbled together, and no one outside of the White House press corps pays much attention to the proceedings. 

At least, that’s how these shindigs unfolded before Trump entered the White House. During Trump’s tenure, these otherwise perfunctory events were transformed into high-profile skirmishes in the never-ending culture war. Beloved stars — including Curry himself — turned down invitations from Trump. When athletes did make the trek to the White House, they were greeted with angry jeers from liberals and spreads of fast food from the president (resulting in what remains, for our money, the single funniest photo in American political history). The whole spectacle became a referendum on athletes’ politics, their willingness to acquiesce to tradition over belief, and their role (or lack thereof) in the #resistance. 

In the heat of the moment, it was certainly fun to see athletes snub Trump, whose self-worth is pathologically wrapped up in his chumminess with famous athletes. With a little bit of distance, though, we think it’s fair to conclude that whether or not you attend a photo op at the White House is a monumentally silly political acid test. For athletes like Curry with generally left-leaning politics, the decision is essentially arbitrary: Was it kosher to visit George W. Bush’s White House during the Iraq War? Does a visit to the Biden White House condone Biden’s history of locking up Black Americans for low-level drug offenses? Is the problem the policy, the person in charge, or just their public-facing personality?

The point, here, is not that athletes should spend hours scrutinizing a president’s policy record before they get on the bus to Washington. It’s that the Trump years gave us a prime opportunity to let this silly little charade die, and we should have taken it.

Trump was a uniquely odious and dangerous figure, and it made a lot of sense for athletes to follow their consciences and skip the photo op. But the controversy around White House visits during his tenure did raise a legitimate question — namely: Why on earth do we keep doing this? Once upon a time, these visits may have been quaint little displays of national unity — championship athletes, like spelling-bee champions, were rewarded for their excellence with an all-expenses-paid trip to D.C. But in the post-Trump era, they’re not “normal” again. They’re just weird. 

As a general point, we think it’s actually a good thing that fans are scrutinizing the political implications of athletes’ actions. It holds athletes accountable for using their public platforms for good, and it also gives them a chance to lead on important issues. But the White House visit is not a street protest or a political demonstration. It’s a photo op. It doesn’t make a political point or advance an agenda. It just says: “I’m here, mostly because I have to be.” 

Luckily, the solution is simple. Stop going at all — ever. If you’re a member of a title-winning sports franchise and you think an American administration is doing a particularly bang-up job, hit the trail with them, raise some money for them, canvass for them. Actually help them out politically. If the person in the White House doesn’t reach that meager standard, then why go in the first place?

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RODNEY’S ROUNDUP

Do you want to read about . . .

. . . how Fox is potentially implicated in the FIFA corruption scandal? “FIFA Trial Could Implicate Fox, a Major Player in Soccer,” by Ken Bensinger in The New York Times (Jan. 16, 2023).

. . . California’s first step toward paying college athletes? “California bill calls for revenue sharing in college sports,” by Beth Harris and Ralph Russo for The Associated Press (Jan 20, 2023).

. . . a prime candidate for an NFL head coaching job — who isn’t white? “Black interim coaches face a steep climb. Will Carolina elevate Steve Wilks?” by Michael Lee in The Washington Post (January 15, 2023).

. . . a minor defeat in the fight against trans-bashing in sports? “Lawsuit over Indiana's transgender sports ban in schools dismissed,” by Caroline Beck in The Indianapolis Star (Jan 20, 2023).