Trump, USA Men’s Hockey Face Backlash Over Comment On Women’s Team | EUROtoday

President Donald Trump is dealing with criticism on Monday after he joked with the Olympic podium-topping U.S. males’s ice hockey staff about having to ask the gold medal-winning American ladies’s squad to the White House, as effectively.

In a congratulatory cellphone name with the U.S. males, who took gold on the Winter Olympics for the primary time in 46 years, Trump instructed utilizing army plane to fly the staff out to his State of the Union tackle on Tuesday earlier than sharing a “very cool” pitch for the staff to go to the White House the next day.

“And we have to — I must tell you — we’re going to have to bring the women’s team,” stated Trump, who went on to chuckle because the American males burst into laughter in a clip circulating on social media.

He added, “[If I don’t] do that, I do believe I probably would be impeached, OK?”

The clip exhibits FBI Director Kash Patel, who’s dealing with backlash of his personal for guzzling beers with the U.S. males on a reportedly taxpayer-funded journey to Italy, holding the cellphone as Trump speaks to the staff and telling the president in a slurred voice that he can prepare such a go to.

Both the U.S. women and men went undefeated in group stage play on the Winter Olympics and made it by the playoffs earlier than securing gold by defeating the rival Canadians in time beyond regulation, by the identical rating (2-1).

The win for the American ladies marked their third gold for the reason that Olympic sport’s introduction again in 1998.

A spokesperson for Team USA informed NBC News that the White House invited the ladies’s staff to the SOTU tackle and, whereas they’re “sincerely grateful” for the invitation, the gamers are unable to attend “due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments.”

It stays unclear whether or not members of the lads’s squad will make it out to the SOTU tackle on Tuesday, and if members of both staff have dedicated to visiting the White House the following day or sooner or later.

HuffPost has reached out to the White House and USA Hockey for remark.

Social media customers slammed Trump over his joke, together with activist Shannon Watts, who denounced the president on X for “begrudgingly” extending the invite to the gold medal-winning ladies. She slammed the lads’s staff for laughing alongside.

Critics on X known as the lads within the video “spineless” and characterised the clip as “dispiriting” and “inexcusable.”

One high touch upon Reddit described the joke as “absolutely shameful.”

“I wish I was surprised… but gd it still turns my stomach knowing I was cheering for them just yesterday,” the commenter wrote of the lads’s staff.

Others within the Reddit thread expressed their disappointment with brothers Quinn and Jack Hughes, the latter of whom scored the golden objective for the U.S. males on Sunday, for showing to snigger on the joke.

The siblings’ mom, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, performed for the U.S. ladies’s staff within the early ’90s and labored as a participant improvement advisor for the squad in Milan.

Trump’s proposed date for Team USA’s White House go to — Wednesday — notably conflicts with the date that the NHL season is ready to renew play following an prolonged break as a result of Winter Olympics.

Professional Women’s Hockey League gamers are additionally set to return to the ice on Thursday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) informed reporters on Monday he was wanting into the logistics of a possible D.C. go to by the groups.

NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly informed The Athletic that it’s as much as the lads’s gamers to resolve whether or not they’d settle for such invites on a person foundation and, thereafter, their groups must log out on such a go to.