In 2019, Mookie Betts, then an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, refused President Trump’s invitation to visit the White House, along with eight of his teammates and the Red Sox manager, Alex Cora. The Red Sox were the World Series champs and the invite was standard presidential photo-op protocol.
Betts, the American League’s Most Valuable Player that year, didn’t say why he declined Trump’s invitation, but all the Red Sox who stayed away were Black or Latino, and several foreign-born players noted that Trump’s immigrant-bashing shaped their decisions.
Betts may soon have to decide again whether to visit Trump at the White House, if and when an invite is extended to his current team, the 2024 World Series champion Dodgers. (Betts and the championship team showed up in force in 2021, when President Biden was the White House host.)
All presidents like taking photos with athletes. In 1910, President Taft began the tradition of throwing out the first pitch on opening day. President Reagan started the ritual of presidents hosting big-game winners at the White House. It was during Trump’s first presidency that the tradition turned particularly controversial.
Trump, of course, has his friends among sports figures, including Mike Tyson, Tom Brady, Herschel Walker, Curt Schilling, Brett Favre, Tiger Woods, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and Linda McMahon, the billionaire co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment and Trump’s secretary of Education.
But other athletes have made their objections to the president’s leadership clear.
In the spring of 2016, during Trump’s first campaign, Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, a Mexican American, refused to stay with the team at a Trump-owned hotel in Chicago. Asked if his decision was related to Trump’s attacks on immigrants, Gonzalez said, “You can draw your own conclusions. They’re probably right.”
That fall, after the media revealed that Trump had boasted that he could “grab” women’s genitals, he dismissed his comment as just “locker-room talk.” Washington Nationals’ pitcher Sean Doolittle was one of many athletes who denounced Trump. He tweeted, “As an athlete, I’ve been in locker rooms my entire adult life and uh, that’s not locker-room talk.”
By then, Trump had also tangled with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand during the national anthem to protest U.S. racism. “Maybe he should find a country that works better for him,” Trump told an interviewer in August 2016.
And after he was elected, Trump challenged NFL owners to release any player who kneeled in protest during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!” Trump bellowed at a rally in Alabama in September 2017.
The next weekend, more than 200 NFL players kneeled in defiance of Trump. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell defended the protesters but, by then, Kaepernick had been effectively blackballed.
Basketball got into it with the president as well. After the Golden State Warriors won the 2017 NBA championship, the White House and the team were working out a meeting time when Steph Curry said he wouldn’t attend and the president retaliated, tweeting that the team was disinvited.
Much the same thing happened in 2018, when only a handful of the members of the NFL Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles would commit to attending a White House event with Trump. The president canceled it. (The 2025 champion Eagles have formally accepted a White House invitation this year.)
In 2019, it was a women’s team that conspicuously avoided the ritual. Trump criticized soccer great Megan Rapinoe, star of the U.S. Women’s National Team, for not singing the national anthem, and after the team won the Women’s World Cup, its members, too, declined to meet with Trump.
Of course, neither fans nor athletes all share similar political views. Using sports as a political tool, President Trump attended the Super Bowl in early February, and the Daytona 500 race days later, where he and his entourage took a lap around the track.
It might be preferable that sports and politics didn’t mix at all, but the two have been wound together tightly for decades.
Team owners donate big bucks to elected officials, sometimes in hopes of favors, including government subsidies for new stadiums. Over the years, owners of the Dodgers, Clippers, Lakers, Angels, Sparks, L.A. Kings and the Galaxy have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to campaigns and lobbying efforts.
And fans applaud veterans at games, cheer when the stealth bomber flies over the Rose Bowl, and unlike at most sporting events around the world, expect to sing the national anthem before the game begins.
So what should we expect the hometown World Series champs to do in 2025? The logical time for a Trump-Dodger rapprochement would be in just about a month, when Los Angeles will be headed to Washington to play the Nationals starting April 7.
Don’t bet on it.
Betts has remained outspoken on social issues. In 2020, the year he joined the Dodgers, Betts took a knee during the national anthem to protest American racism and the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer. “I’m more than an athlete,” he said. In August that year, he led the team in sitting out a game to protest the police killing of another Black man, this time in Wisconsin. Manager Dave Roberts joined the protest.
Two well-known athletes with an ownership stake in the Dodgers — former Lakers star Magic Johnson and women’s tennis great Billie Jean King — have criticized Trump and served as co-chairs for an Athletes for Harris effort during the 2024 presidential campaign. King said that during Trump’s first term, the country was “going backwards” in the fight for equality.
All in all, it’s hard to imagine the Dodgers agreeing to a celebratory photo op with the president right now. Los Angeles is not just Dodger blue, but Democrat blue. The president lost L.A. County by 33 percentage points. In his feuds with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Trump has threatened to withhold fire disaster funds without concessions. He seems to never miss an opportunity to take a swipe at the Golden State.
The World Champion Dodgers should stand up to, not next to, the president. If an overture from the White House comes, they can send a friendly note: Thanks, but no.
Kelly Candaele produced the documentary film “A League of Their Own” about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Peter Dreier is a professor of politics at Occidental College and co–author of “Baseball Rebels: The Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America.”