The cheeky fire-starters at Eight by Eight magazine knew exactly what they were doing when they waited six whole months until the business end of the Women’s World Cup to publish the interview with Megan Rapinoe they had recorded in January. At least as much as the impish American midfielder knew what she was provoking when asked whether the US women’s national soccer team she captains intended to visit Donald Trump if they managed the exceedingly rare feat of repeating as world champions.
“I’m not going to the fucking White House,” Rapinoe flatly stated. “No fucking way will we be invited to the White House.”
The release of the Rapinoe interview during the last week of June was a journalistic depth charge timed for maximum impact. The USA women, who had only just outrun an early-tournament controversy where they had become perhaps the first team in World Cup history to come under criticism for scoring too many goals (yes, really), were one day removed from seeing off Spain to set up a blockbuster quarter-final with the hosts, France, when the teaser clip dropped and went viral.
Trump, an instinctive counter-puncher who never met a spotlight he didn’t try to hijack, fired back the next day with a warning to Rapinoe to not “disrespect” her country: “Women’s soccer player, @meganrapino, just stated that she is ‘not going to the F … ing White House if we win’. Other than the NBA … teams love coming to the White House. I am a big fan of the American Team, and Women’s Soccer, but Megan should WIN first before she TALKS!”
Nothing about the presidential riposte came as a surprise, least of all the lie that he likes soccer or that he initially addressed it to the wrong Megan Rapinoe. Ever since he seized on Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police violence as a wellspring of easy political points, Trump has regularly co-opted sport as not merely a proxy battle in the culture wars but a primary theatre. Suddenly Rapinoe and co were no longer solely up against the growing cluster of European powers that have closed the competitive gap over the past decade, but what seemed like the entire American right.
Rapinoe was openly backed by her teammates as the back-and-forth with Trump came to overshadow the team’s looming showdown with a hotly tipped France side eager to knock the Americans off their perch. Alex Morgan also made it known she wouldn’t go to the White House, while Ali Krieger threw her support behind Rapinoe, saying Trump was angered by women he “cannot control or grope” and decrying what she described as the administration’s “fight against LGBTQ+ citizens, immigrants & our most vulnerable”.
But Rapinoe, a lesbian with a taste for the fight whose unapologetic political views have made her a lightning rod for conservatives, was always the primary target, with more skin in the game than anyone else. Not that she would have it any other way.
The rest is history. The purple-haired talisman, who turned 34 during the tournament, bounced back from a somewhat ponderous showing in group play to score pivotal goals in three of her side’s final four matches, earning the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer and the Golden Ball as the best overall player, while helping the US become the third country to defend successfully a World Cup, men’s or women’s, since the second world war.
Even after the USA returned home after defeating the Netherlands for their record fourth world title, Rapinoe’s right-wing critics redoubled in volume and numbers – no doubt irked by the pictures beamed around the globe of fronting a ticker-tape parade in lower Manhattan with the World Cup trophy in one hand and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame in the other.
The Fox News anchor Howard Kurtz accused Rapinoe of using her platform “to mar or spoil or tar what could have been this great unifying victory”, while the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro said the midfielder was getting lucrative contracts only because she’s an “outspoken lesbian” who just happens to be good at soccer.
Piers Morgan, who had previously hit out at Rapinoe’s statuesque pose after the second of her two goals to beat France, called her unbearable, while the Fox News host Jesse Watters decried her “unpatriotic” behaviour, saying it undermined the team’s campaign for equal pay. Sebastian Gorka, a former White House aide, invoked Rapinoe (“this woman who dyes her hair, who thinks she’s a big warrior”) to allege the US team were out “to destroy everything that is wholesome in our country and in our Judeo-Christian civilisation”.
Everything about Rapinoe – the flamboyant hairstyle, the victory pose that launched a thousand memes, the unrepentant egotism – makes them angry. She was the first white athlete to take a knee during the Star-Spangled Banner in solidarity with Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2016, and drew criticism for standing with her hands at her sides during the World Cup while representing the US on a global stage. She has consistently spoken up for LGBT rights and has also been one of the faces of a gender-discrimination complaint filed by a group of US women’s players alleging they are paid less than their male counterparts. Not since Kaepernick has a single athlete made them so uncomfortable.
But not unlike the exiled former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, she has compelled the country to engage in conversations once considered forbidden in public square – turning the afterglow of her team’s championship on vital matters of LGBTQ rights as well as racial and gender equality.
And no, she never made it to the White House.
“I don’t think anyone on the team has any interest in lending the platform that we’ve worked so hard to build and the things that we fight for and the way that we live our life,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper during the team’s extended victory lap. “I don’t think that we want that to be co-opted or corrupted by this administration.”
When asked whether she had a message for Trump, she took a breath, broke the fourth wall and spoke: “Your message is excluding people. You’re excluding me, you’re excluding people that look like me, you’re excluding people of colour, you’re excluding Americans that maybe support you.”
She went on: “I think that we need to have a reckoning with the message that you have and what you’re saying about ‘Make America great again’. I think that you’re harking back to an era that was not great for everyone. It might have been great for a few people. Maybe America is great for a few people right now. But it’s not great for enough Americans.”
Win before you talk? No problem. And by taking the fight to enemies foreign and domestic, our purple-haired champion and voice of the disenfranchised ensured the Summer of Rapinoe will be long remembered.