[Essay]
Republicans Are Being Insane About Caitlin Clark Again
The right pretends to care about women’s sports in one of two circumstances: when trans girls are involved, or when they can project their racial grievances onto Indiana Fever player Caitlin Clark.
The latter provided grist for the faux outrage mill this week, as elected Republicans caught up to a tediously long simmering kerfuffle over a foul Phoenix Mercury player Alyssa Thomas committed against Clark in late June. The two got tangled up and fell to the floor; as Thomas, who has torn labrums in both shoulders, tried to push herself up, her balled first seemed to slide onto Clark’s throat. The freeze frame makes it look like Thomas was trying to hurt Clark, though in the full clip, Thomas is already looking up towards the ball as she tries to get up. The Mercury guard was later assessed a flagrant 2 foul, a one-game suspension and a fine.
The photo quickly attracted the most loathsome elements online (yes, I mean Barstool’s Dave Portnoy) and eventually crossed the boundary from right-wing curious (male) sports commentators to, well, the president.
“I thought your young, wonderful basketball player — Caitlin (Clark) — I thought she was treated rather rough, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters unprompted on Monday. “That was a much different kind of an event. That was a pretty bad event.”
And a group of Republican congressmen this week sent a letter to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert, threatening prosecution by the Justice Department, the Department of Labor or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for “violations of federal civil rights laws” in the “racially motivated attacks” against Clark. Many lawmakers who shared the letter online were quick to claim that the 29-year-old league wouldn’t exist without Clark’s participation.
This exact media cycle has played out at least three times since Clark entered the WNBA: She gets fouled by a Black player (Thomas, DiJonai Carrington, Chennedy Carter) and the right pounces, insisting that Clark — straight, white — is unsafe in a league full of thugs that want to hurt her.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) — why a congressman from Tennessee is involved at all is beyond me — suggested that Clark should play in Europe, where she’d be safer (presumably Burchett assumes that only white women play basketball overseas).
“Caitlin Clark is a bball superstar who gets consistently treated unfairly on the court she gets a fist to the throat for example,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) tweeted in his usual semi-literate style. “As a fan I don’t appreciate ill treatment So refs start treating Caitlin like u do every other player. What happened last night shldnt happen again.”
And some decided to jump atop the dogpile in a milder way, as Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), a self-professed non-fan of the WNBA, critiqued the league’s lack of marketing of Clark. How someone who doesn’t follow the league has a finger on the pulse of its ad campaigns — in which Clark features heavily — is somewhat mysterious.
Thomas, a soft-spoken player who’s in a relationship with teammate DeWanna Bonner, told reporters that she and her family have received death threats.
Every facet of this story is infuriating to real fans of the WNBA. Basketball is a physical game and hard fouls happen — but in a mostly-Black league, the only episodes that break containment always feature a Black player fouling a white one (check out this egregious play by Clark teammate Sophie Cunningham on then-Connecticut Sun guard Jacy Sheldon, which prompted no congressional inquiry).
Clark herself — a talented, exciting, hyper-competative shit-talker — doesn’t hesitate to dish it out on the court, but can be frustratingly lukewarm in response to the right-wing media explosions. It makes her an easier avatar for these actors to project their agenda onto than, say, Paige Bueckers, another white, number-one draft pick who entered the league a year after Clark, but has been consistently outspoken about the different standards of treatment for white players versus Black ones (she is also openly gay, perhaps making her a more difficult fit for reactionaries).
It all presses on one of the W’s deepest sore spots: the league’s longtime prioritization of white players as its posterchildren over Black ones, no matter if their skill and accolades justify such all-star status.
And it’s a hijacking of the league’s indisputable success story by figures who routinely dismiss and demean female athletes when they can’t use them as politician pawns. Clark, Bueckers, former LSU star Angel Reese and future hall-of-famer A’ja Wilson have all injected the game with excitement and drawn in thousands of new fans. The players association tirelessly fought for and won a life-changing new collective bargaining agreement, giving the players livable wages, private flights, protection from pregnancy discrimination and many other rights that are standard in even less popular men’s leagues. The league has added three new expansion teams since 2025, with teams in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia coming in the next three years. Broadcast networks and streaming services are jockeying to get a slice of the ever more profitable pie.
In a time of authoritarian backsliding, a league of mostly gay, Black women is making historic progress. No wonder Republicans keep returning to this well — it’s an existential threat to the world they’re trying to impose.