Retiring U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe ended her United States Women’s National Team career in disappointing fashion as the team lost in the quarterfinals of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
There was a surge of criticism and happiness from American conservative circles over the loss due to their perception that the players had focused too much on “woke” things instead of soccer.
Many of these critics didn’t actually watch or care about women’s soccer but just appreciated the chance to try to insult Rapinoe and her teammates. One such critic was former President Donald Trump.
“The ‘shocking and totally unexpected’ loss by the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden,” Trump wrote after the team’s loss on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Now, the outspoken soccer star is smacking back.
Rapinoe responded to Trump, saying his “fake” attacks lack any basis in reality.
“It always is [hard to parse],” Rapinoe said of Trump’s criticism, “because what he’s saying is fake. It’s a compilation of hit words and hot-button words that don’t actually make any sort of sense or square with reality at all.”
“I think, just in general, the way that our team was spoken about over the course of the tournament, it was fake. And it didn’t make sense to me: In 2019, we were ultra-confident, ultra-swaggy — and won everything. And even though we won, we did it in bad taste, according to our critics,” Rapinoe said. “This time, we weren’t confident enough, and we don’t have the right ‘mentality.’ And so we lost. It’s just so disingenuous. There’s no way for us to win, and there’s no way for us to lose.”
President Joe Biden awarded Rapinoe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022.
