After a Winter Olympic Games of athletes celebrating each other as much as they did winning, the response from the Trump administration is equal parts disheartening and gross.  These are people who are functionally incapable of seeing the Olympics as anything but an opportunity to display their xenophobic loathing of other countries and to celebrate victory as a sort of violent domination.  In short, the Trump team simply didn’t understand anything about these Olympics.  Amber Glenn takes a selfie with ice dance team Madison Chock and Evan Bates after winning gold on Feb. 8. Perhaps the highest-profile example of this was the diminutive FBI Director Kash Patel partying with the U.S. men’s hockey team on your dime.  Or maybe it’s that, after the men’s hockey team beat Canada for the gold, the official White House X account posted a picture—which we can all safely assume is AI slop—of a bald eagle attacking a Canadian goose on a frozen lake. Beating Canada in a hockey game apparently means we have subjugated the entire country? Terrific.  Or perhaps it’s the AI slop video of President Donald Trump—the biggest, most pathetic starfucker there ever was—inserting himself into the game so he could punch a Canadian hockey player.  This behavior would be disgusting at any time, but it’s especially jarring after an Olympics where the athletes themselves made conscious decisions to show care for each other—including their rivals. Nowhere was this clearer than in figure skating, where U.S. skaters banded together to cheer other countries’ skaters on, with Ilia Malinin taking time to congratulate Mikhail Shaidorov for his gold medal—even after Malinin’s didn’t place at all for his free skate performance.  And after Japan’s Kaori Sakamoto was inundated with reporters forcing cameras in her face, she learned that she lost the gold to U.S. skater Alysa Liu. Liu’s teammate, Amber Glenn, rushed to comfort Sakamoto, telling one reporter to stop trying to film her crying.  But it wasn’t just figure skaters.  After Australian snowboarder Valentino Guseli unexpectedly made it into the finals of the big air competition, Swiss snowboarder Jonas Hasler carried Guseli around on his shoulders in celebration. Australia's Valentino Guseli competes during the men's snowboarding halfpipe finals on Feb. 13. And we also were treated to the adorableness of “Dads Podium,” where all three dual moguls winners were joined by their partners and young children.  It also wasn’t just athletes.  The closing ceremony highlighted how important togetherness was to the games, with International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry  telling athletes in her final remarks, “You showed us that the Olympic Games are a place for everyone. A place where sport brings us together.” She also thanked the Italian people for their graciousness toward the athletes. “You celebrated your champions and you cheered for athletes of every nation, showing that passion and respect can live side by side,” Coventry  said. The notion that people can care for each other—even as sports rivals—and that connection matters more than jingoism and xenophobia is utterly foreign to people like Trump. The only thing he knows how to celebrate is the subjugation of others.  Related | Why the Olympics turn Republicans into sore losers Sadly, it looks like the U.S. men’s hockey team is totally down for this sort of thing, eagerly accepting Trump’s invitation to his State of the Union address on Tuesday.  The plans for it already sound gross, with House Speaker Mike Johnson trying to break the House rule that says that no special guests are allowed on the floor. He says he’s “trying to work out logistics to see if there’s some way to perhaps get them into the gallery and the doors, wave and receive the applause they’re due.” Proposing to break legislative rules to do some xenophobic screaming about AMERICA is so on brand for this administration that it feels like the writers’ room for this season is getting lazy.  But unfortunately, it’s real. At least the rest of us can fall back on our memories of what it looks like when athletes come together and care for each other. Read more