President Donald Trump delivered a meandering address at the White House Friday while presenting the Commander-in-Chief’s trophy to the U.S. Navy Midshipmen football team.
Standing before the burly Navy football players, Trump mixed up his own sports gender-wars rhetoric before going on a long tangent denouncing transgender people in women’s sports, a topic on which Trump regularly harps.
Calling up to the podium the team’s co-captain, Landon Robinson, Trump repeatedly gripped and playfully patted the 6-foot-tall, 287-pound defensive lineman, before cracking, “His arms are like steel. I just hurt my hand.”
Then he oddly weaved into comments about gender and sports. “What about women playing in men’s sports? Think we could have a woman take your position?” Trump asked Robinson, before seeming to sort out his oft-repeated anti-transgender message. “These Democrats keep pushing these things, open borders, transgender for everybody, and they want to have men playing women’s sports.”
And as he introduced the team, Trump first lauded his own efforts to allow military deferments of service so that top players can join the NFL before completing their commitments. “They have the best heart in the business,” he said. “But size does matter, and so what we did is we got that so you have a deferment, so a lot of people are able to join now, and they do their service later.”
The president has pushed for the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act and to include provisions in it that would ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. Republicans are once again hoping that they can make it an issue that resonates with voters in the 2026 midterm elections the way that it did in the 2024 presidential election when Trump ran his “Kamala is for They/Them” ad.
Trump also bragged that when he attended the game, nobody booed him — as is the case with most sporting events he attends.
“But they couldn’t find any person [who booed] at that game,” Trump said of his coverage from the game. “That was some game.”
The president also said that many of the players will be commissioned as officers and tied it into his military ventures in Iran and Venezuela.
“We have the greatest military in the world, the strongest, the greatest,” he said. “The United States Navy, the Marines, the whole military. We have the greatest in the world. I was so proud of what I did.”
And he folded in comments about the current war in Iran.
“The world has seen the true strength and might of our sailors and aviators as they fought in one of the most complex and successful military operations of all time against the Iranian regime,” Trump said. “And it’s amazing. It’s not, I don’t want to get too crazy here, not a contest. It’s not even a contest.”
A key plank for the president with respect to the military academies has focused on trying to control the NCAA college football schedule to prohibit other teams from playing during the annual Army-Navy game, which the president attends.
“Nobody’s playing football, not Ohio State against Notre Dame, not LSU against Alabama,” Trump insisted in his remarks. “Nobody’s going to play football for four hours during that very special time of the year in December.”
