Donald Trump told America’s Winter Olympians that he doesn’t like some of the sports teams he hosts at the White House.
The president, 80, welcomed dozens of Team USA athletes, coaches, and staff to the East Room on Thursday evening to mark a haul of 57 medals at February’s Milano Cortina Games in Italy, including a record-breaking 12 golds. Rain pushed the event indoors from the Rose Garden. Trump then offered the group a walk through the Oval Office.
“I don’t do this with too many other teams,” he said in a video of the meeting, posted by the White House on X later that night. “Most of them I just want to get out of there.” He went on: “Some of them I like and some of them I don’t like so much. But they all come here.”
Trump said no U.S. athlete won more in Italy than speedskater Jordan Stolz, and marveled at his “very strong legs,” the Associated Press reported. Stolz draped his gold on the president at a Wisconsin rally earlier this summer.
One Team USA skier did not make the event: freestyle halfpipe rider Hunter Hess, who was left off the guest list that the White House circulated before the event. Hess drew the president’s fire in the run-up to the opening ceremony. Asked how it felt to wear the flag, the first-time Olympian said the moment brought “mixed emotions,” in comments taken as a reference to the shooting of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents in Minnesota just the previous month.
Trump answered on Truth Social, branding Hess “a real Loser,” but Hess did not back down. In an Instagram post the next day, he said the country had plenty to be proud of but that “there are always things that could be better.” After his qualifying run, he raised a finger-and-thumb L to his forehead, telling reporters: “Apparently, I’m a loser.”
The friction did not end in Italy. The gold-winning U.S. women’s hockey team rejected an invitation to Trump’s State of the Union address days after he told the men’s squad, on a speakerphone call to their locker room, that he would be impeached if he left the women out. USA Hockey cited classes and job-commitment conflicts. Members of that team came to Thursday’s reception anyway.
Five men’s players skipped their own Oval Office visit in February, among them Winnipeg Jets forward Kyle Connor and Dallas Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger. The 20 who attended sat for a bipartisan ovation at the speech that night.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
