President Donald Trump basked in the gold medal glory of the US Olympic males’s hockey workforce Tuesday, spending roughly six minutes of his State of the Union address celebrating their victory after assembly with the workforce in the Oval Office earlier in the day.
His recognition of the workforce marked one of the few bipartisan moments of the speech, receiving prolonged, raucous applause and chants of “USA” — and proving that sports activities, even in a time of intense political polarization, can carry individuals collectively.
It got here after some controversy following the workforce’s historic 2-1 Olympic victory over Canada. Trump regaled the males’s workforce by cellphone Sunday as the athletes celebrated in the locker room in Italy, inviting them to his address and even providing to ship a army aircraft to carry them — and the gold-medal-winning girls’s hockey workforce — to Washington, DC.
“I must tell you, we’re gonna have to bring the women’s team — you do know that,” Trump stated over a speakerphone held by FBI Director Kash Patel.
If the girls weren’t invited, the president stated to laughter in the locker room, “I do believe I probably would be impeached, OK?”
Team USA males’s hockey workforce seem during State of the Union address
The second — and the gamers’ response — prompted important backlash on social media.
Both the males’s and ladies’s hockey groups have been formally invited to attend Trump’s address, based on a spokesperson for the girls’s workforce. The girls declined the invitation, citing prior tutorial {and professional} commitments. Trump stated during his Tuesday speech that the girls’s workforce would quickly be coming to the White House.
But members of the males’s workforce climbed aboard a army aircraft, touchdown at Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday afternoon in matching navy American flag sweaters accessorized with their medals. They frolicked with the president inside the Oval Office, with Trump making an attempt on Matthew Tkachuk’s gold medal and joking he didn’t plan to provide it again.
Tuesday night, they performed a starring function in Trump’s large speech as he launched the athletes to drive residence an argument that the nation is “winning again.”
“Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it,” Trump stated.
He continued: “To prove that point, to prove that perfect here with us tonight is a group of winners who just made the entire nation proud: the men’s gold medal Olympic hockey team. Come on in.”
In a dramatic entrance, the workforce arrived in the House chamber by means of units of double doorways into the press gallery and acquired a standing ovation from each Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever seen them get up,” Trump mused of the Democrats.
Trump additionally introduced that he would award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to goalie Connor Hellebuyck, whose efficiency was key to the first American males’s hockey gold medal since 1980.
“I will soon be presenting Connor with our highest civilian honor … the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Great athletes have gotten that — very great, the best, and I thought he deserved it,” Trump stated.
Some of the workforce members weren’t in attendance, based on a spokesperson for USA Hockey, who pointed to the National Hockey League schedule, which resumes Wednesday.