MAGA Is Coming for the WNBA [View all]

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.



https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/27/wnba-collision-trump-maga-00572971