USA women's hockey team rejects Trump's SOTU invitation

Plus: Republican women are calling on Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tx.) to resign after his former mistress and staffer died by suicide.

Julien De Rosa / AFP - Getty Images

Folks: We’ve been told that nobody cares about women’s sports more than Donald Trump does. "Under the Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes, and we will not allow men to beat up, injure and cheat our women and our girls," he said one year ago after signing an executive order banning trans women from participating in women’s athletics. It was one of the very first things he did as president.

So I could forgive some people for being confused by the very differing responses the Trump administration has had to the USA men’s and women’s hockey teams both going into overtime to beat Canada for the gold. Over on the men’s side, FBI director Kash Patel spent $75K in taxpayer dollars to fly on a private jet to watch the final game and party with the team in the locker room after, where he jumped around and chugged beers like a coked up frat boy (while Savannah Guthrie’s mother remains kidnapped).

Then Trump called the men’s team to congratulate them and offered to fly them to his State of the Union Address tomorrow. Desperate for their approval, he bragged about how his government planes can take off through any kind of weather, and then he tucked in a joke about how he was obligated to invite the dumb little women’s team too. “I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that,” he can be heard saying on speakerphone, as the players laugh. “I do believe I probably would be impeached."

Kash Patel was not seen partying with the women’s team, which was surely a relief to them, nor did Trump personally call to congratulate them and name-check their goalie. And shortly after Trump’s phone call to the men was made public today, the women’s team announced that they unfortunately can’t make it to the White House tomorrow due to scheduling conflicts.

“We are sincerely grateful for the invitation extended to our gold medal–winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team and deeply appreciate the recognition of their extraordinary achievement,” a USA Hockey spokesperson said. “Due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments following the Games, the athletes are unable to participate.”

Obviously, the men shouldn’t show up either. But the way they were lapping up Trump’s attention like dogs in that video, I suspect most of them don’t mind when the president joke like a 12-year-old boy about women’s sports being trivial after the literal Olympic games, much less do they have the depth to grasp the more pressing reasons for protest. Groups of men peacocking for each other’s approval by throwing women under the bus is a tale as old as time.

In other news…

Here’s an absolutely unhinged story: A group of Republican congresswomen, Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), and Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), are calling on Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) to resign after text messages surfaced showing that he pressured one his staffers to send him explicit photos and engage in an affair before she died by self-immolation.

"'Send me a sexy pic,' Rep. Tony Gonzales texted Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, then director of his regional district office in Uvalde.

Santos-Aviles replied that she’d had a rough week and 'you don't really want a hot picture of me.'

'Yes I do,' Gonzales texted, adding, 'Hurry.'"

At one point the congressman asked his staffer about her sexual preferences, to which she replies, “This is going too far boss.”

Santos-Aviles, a mother, died by suicide in September after the alleged affair. She lit herself on fire at home.

The women calling on Gonzales to resign are the same women who broke with the GOP on the Epstein files.

Lauren Boebert, whose problems I’ve written about extensively, is even standing up to those in her own party who are pointing out that losing Gonzales could cost Republicans their razor-thin majority in the House.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), supposedly an Evangelical Christian, refused to pull his endorsement of Gonzales in light of the texts. "You have to allow investigations to play out and all the facts to come out,” he said today.

So once again, Mike Johnson finds himself on the wrong side of Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, two of the most unhinged members of Congress (one got a hand job during a local theater performance of Beetlejuice and the other faked a wrist injury after shaking hands with a trans rights advocate), in defense of sexual misconduct. And the GOP’s House majority is now threatened by a man who literally drove a woman to set herself on fire.