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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MAGA IS COMING FOR THE WNBA  
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Alex Keeney
September 27, 2025
Politico
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_ The nation’s most prominent — and most politically active —
women’s pro sports league is on a collision course with Donald
Trump. _

, Illustration by Bill Kuchman/POLITICO (source images via Getty
Images and AP)

 

The WNBA is America’s most prominent women’s professional sports
league. But in recent years, it has also been a showcase for something
else: defiantly anti-MAGA politics. 

The WNBA has partnered with groups like Planned Parenthood and GLSEN,
an LGBTQ+ youth organization. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020,
the league dedicated its entire season to “social justice.”
Players went so far as to wear “Black Lives Matter” warmups and
gameday jerseys emblazoned with the name of Breonna Taylor, a victim
of police violence.

The politics don’t stop at symbolism. The Seattle Storm franchise
publicly endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, and players
on the Atlanta Dream donned T-shirts that same year endorsing Democrat
Raphael Warnock against then-Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler
— despite the fact that Loeffler was the team’s co-owner at the
time. A handful of New York Liberty players, knowing they’d be
photographed
[[link removed]],
showed up at a 2024 game wearing Kamala Harris T-shirts.

It’s a level of activism that’s unparalleled in pro sports. And
it’s placed the league on a collision course with Donald Trump.

 

[WNBA players taking a knee on a court with BLACK LIVES MATTER printed
on it]

Members of the Connecticut Sun team kneel during the playing of the
national anthem before a WNBA basketball game against the Washington
Mystics, in Bradenton, Fla on Aug. 30, 2020. | Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

Trump allies and associates, influencers and some GOP lawmakers —
among them Donald Trump Jr., Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), activist athlete
Riley Gaines, and an army of meme artists and podcasters — are
already in the fight. In recent months they have zeroed in on the
WNBA, banging the same culture war drums that preceded campaigns
against other perceived bastions of so-called woke thinking.

The right’s rising interest in the WNBA suggests the league could
soon find itself the object of Trump’s ire, another American
institution to be isolated, attacked and reshaped as part of the
president’s MAGA agenda.  

“The WNBA has created a gigantic mess for itself, because it has
leaned very hard into this radical social justice,” said Leigh Ann
O’Neill, chief of staff for litigation at the America First Policy
Institute, a powerful think tank that counts six Trump Cabinet-level
appointees among its alumni.

Unlike other professional sports leagues where players tiptoe around
politics and league commissioners have worked assiduously to remain in
Trump’s good graces during his second term, the WNBA continues to
advocate for positions that place the league in direct opposition to
Trump administration thinking. On the issue of race, there is
the “Educational Resources”
[[link removed]] section of the WNBA
website, which promotes titles such as _How to be An
Anti-Racist_, _The 1619 Project_, and works by Ta-Nehisi Coates and
Kimberlé Crenshaw. And on the issue of immigration, the WNBA Players
Association recently put out a joint statement
[[link removed]] with the National
Women’s Soccer League Player’s Association in support of
undocumented immigrants — at the exact moment that Trump was
conducting controversial ICE raids in Los Angeles.

“This is a league that is dominated by women of color, Black women.
At least within the last couple of decades, it’s been a very openly
queer league,” said Cheryl Cooky, a professor who studies the
intersections of gender, sport, media and culture at Purdue
University. When it comes to players’ progressive politics, Cooky
said, “it’s just who they are.” 

Those stances have caught the notice of the online right, which
frequently trolls the WNBA over the quality of play and its player
activism. When the league was recently vexed by an epidemic
of disruptive fans throwing green dildos
[[link removed]] on
the basketball court — a practice that was condemned as misogynistic
and also dangerous to players — some conservatives laughed it off or
encouraged more disruptions.

“This is what Trump fought for. THROW! THROW! THROW!”
wrote Autism Capital
[[link removed]], a popular
conservative social media account, after one incident.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and one of his closest
advisers, also made light of the trend in early August, posting
a doctored image on X 
[[link removed]]of his father throwing
a sex toy at some WNBA players. 

“This is all figuring into the larger conservative strategy of using
women’s sports to advance particular elements of the culture
wars,” said Cooky. “It’s really being elevated by political
leaders, even at the highest level.” 

All of this has accompanied a surge in the WNBA’s popularity. 

[Caitlin Clark]

In 2024, her rookie season, Caitlin Clark set WNBA records for most
assists and most points scored at her position and inked a Nike
endorsement deal worth a reported $28 million. | Elsa/Getty Images

The WNBA did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Fueling the league’s growth has been the emergence of a charismatic
star in 2024, straight out of a Kevin Costner sports movie — right
down to the Iowa cornfields. Enter Caitlin Clark. 

In 2024, her rookie season, Clark set WNBA records for most assists
and most points scored at her position and inked a Nike endorsement
deal worth a reported $28 million. The league prospered alongside her.
That year, the WNBA saw a 48 percent increase in attendance and
viewership on its three major broadcasting platforms spiked by double
and triple digits, according to a WNBA press release.
[[link removed]] The
trend has continued in 2025. Data compiled by Front Office Sports
[[link removed]] and Sports
Media Watch
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a record- breaking season in terms of fan attendance and a further 3
percent increase in the WNBA’s TV audience.  

But the Clark effect has also caused growing pains, too. Some WNBA
experts acknowledge that her star power has made veteran players
envious of the flood of attention she receives. And that jealousy has
correlated with more hard physical fouls against her, uncalled fouls
and harsher treatment than would be expected for a superstar of her
caliber. It’s the opposite of how things usually work in
professional sports, where leagues try to protect their top players
because they are so integral to the league’s success — and they
make everyone so much money. 

Many sports fans, especially on the right, believe there is an
unspoken explanation for why this doesn’t apply to Clark.

“The average WNBA player does not like Caitlin Clark because she is
white, because she is straight, and because now she is rich and
getting a lot of attention,” asserted prominent sports broadcaster
and analyst Clay Travis in June, on his popular right-of-center
sports show [[link removed]].
Travis endorsed Donald Trump in 2020 and 2024, and sold his company
to Fox Corporation in 2021.

The allegation that Clark is a victim of anti-white racial
discrimination — leveled by the late conservative activist Charlie
Kirk and prominent activists such as Gaines
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a leading voice against trans athletes in women’s sports — is
grounded in what many fans believe is the disparate treatment she
receives. 

Why, they ask, did a generational talent like Clark not make the 2024
Olympic roster? Why did some league officials throw cold water on
Clark’s Time Athlete of the Year Recognition? Why did her fellow
players only rank her as the 9th best player at her position during
this year’s All Star balloting? And why in the words of Sophie
Cunningham [[link removed]], Clark’s
teammate and enforcer — whose blonde hair and nods to conservative
influencers online have earned her the nickname “MAGA Barbie” —
was the league “not protecting the star player of the WNBA” from
other players roughing her up?

“Everyone knows Caitlin Clark is being targeted by Black women
because she is white,” concluded
[[link removed]] Kirk, the
Turning Points USA founder and close Trump confidante, in May.

Banks, the MAGA senator who represents the home state of Clark’s
team, the Indiana Fever, has been critical of the WNBA as well. 

“Since joining the WNBA, Clark’s exceptionalism has been met with
resentment 

and repeated attacks from fellow players,” Banks, then a House
member, wrote to WNBA Commissioner
[[link removed]] Cathy
Engelbert in July 2024. Banks went on to demand answers about why the
WNBA has been “a league that refuses to hold hostile players
accountable and enforce their own rules” and allows her to be
“physically targeted.” 

Banks stopped short of saying that Clark’s treatment was about race.
But when a skirmish between Clark and rival Angel Reese triggered
controversy this summer, the topic became unavoidable. After the game,
the WNBA opened an investigation into “hateful fan comments”
directed at Reese, who is Black, but failed to address Clark’s
treatment. To some fans, it reeked of a double standard. The WNBA
closed the investigation 10 days later, reporting in a statement
[[link removed]] that it was
unable to substantiate the report of racist fan behavior.

Banks did not respond to requests for comment.

 

[Jim Banks]

Sen. Jim Banks, the MAGA senator who represents the home state of
Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever, has been critical of the WNBA as
well. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

There isn’t universal agreement on whether Clark is being singled
out. According to some league experts, complaints about Clark’s
tough treatment don’t always measure up.

“I think that narrative is overblown and not the overarching feeling
among players,” said Maria Marino, a WNBA analyst and commentator at
ESPN. Clark herself has shrugged off some incidents as merely part of
the game. 

Even so, in early August, a widely circulated op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal titled, “The WNBA and Caitlin Clark’s Civil Rights,”
[[link removed]] laid
out a legal framework for Trump administration intervention.

“The league has fostered a hostile workplace for Ms. Clark through
excessive fouling, targeting, and hostile comments from other players
and owners,” wrote Sean McLean, a Republican consultant with ties to
Sens. Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn and Trump. If the WNBA won’t clean
that up, he concluded, then the Trump administration should do it for
them. 

“It’s the same fact pattern as university presidents who could
have engaged with antisemitism on campus but were paralyzed into
inaction out of fear of offending another group,” McLean explained
in an interview. 

He and other Trump allies see a clear parallel to Columbia and
Harvard, where the reluctance to protect one identity group by
cracking down on another that was more “marginalized” was, in
their analysis, simply another form of discrimination. 

“The EEOC absolutely has the authority to bring a commissioner’s
charge against the WNBA teams if they think that there is this pattern
and practice of discrimination happening,” O’Neill, the America
First Policy Institute lawyer, said. 

“It has the markings of a high-profile hearing,” added Dan Huff, a
lawyer in Trump’s first White House and former House and Senate
Judiciary Committee aide. “It’s something that everyone is talking
about.”  

While the president has so far been quiet about the Clark issue and
the WNBA’s progressive posturing in general, there are signs that
may not last. 

“The President is a huge sports fan and loves talking ball, no
matter the league,” said John McEntee, Trump’s former director of
presidential personnel and his former body man. “I wouldn’t be
surprised if he takes an interest in this matter.” 

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. 

Trump’s willingness to intervene may have been influenced by one
important fact: an injury sidelined Clark for much of the season.
Without her on the floor, the supply of MAGA catnip has been
diminished — at least until Clark returns next season. 

 

[Donald Trump at the Super Bowl]

President Donald Trump, center, salutes as Jon Batiste performs the
national anthem at the NFL Super Bowl 59 football game between the
Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025,
in New Orleans. | Ben Curtis/AP

But his active interest in professional sports — and his habit of
taking sides on the divisive cultural issues roiling various leagues
— is by now well-known. He is not only an avid sports fan, but a
master of the attention economy who has stoked Twitter beefs
with some of America’s best known pro athletes — among them,
Megan Rapinoe
[[link removed]], LeBron
James [[link removed]],
and Steph Curry
[[link removed]]. 

In his first term as president, Trump openly antagonized NFL and NBA
players for their national anthem protests and demanded NFL
Commissioner Roger Goodell
[[link removed]] crack
down on the practice of kneeling during the anthem. In recent months,
Trump has weighed in on numerous contentious sports issues, including
pressuring the NFL’s Washington Commanders to return to their former
name; issuing an executive order calling for the creation of a
national standard for NCAA name, image and likeness programs; and
publicly advocating for Pete Rose and Roger Clemens to be included in
the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Against that backdrop and with the MAGA grassroots egging Trump on, a
fight with the WNBA may prove irresistible to the president.

“Let’s not pretend this is just about the technicalities of the
law,” Huff said.  

* WNBA
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* Donald Trump
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* MAGA
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* Black Lives Matter
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* LGBTQ
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* social justice
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