Politics

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.

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” 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 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 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, 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 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. 

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. The trend has continued in 2025. Data compiled by Front Office Sports and Sports Media Watch show 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. 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, 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, 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 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, [Caitlin] Clark’s exceptionalism has been met with resentment 

and repeated attacks from fellow players,” Banks, then a House member, wrote to WNBA Commissioner 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 that it was unable to substantiate the report of racist fan behavior.

Banks did not respond to requests for comment.

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,” 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. 

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, LeBron James, and Steph Curry. 

In his first term as president, Trump openly antagonized NFL and NBA players for their national anthem protests and demanded NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell 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.