It is unlikely he knows his Maradonas from his Mar-a-Lagos but Donald Trump set his stall out Thursday as a soccer expert, tearing into the "leftist maniacs" of the national women's team for missing out on Olympic gold because they are too "woke."
The former president, who encouraged his supporters at a rally ahead of the Tokyo Games to boo the side, suggested falsely in a statement that the women had refused to stand for the national anthem during the tournament.
"If our soccer team, headed by a radical group of Leftist Maniacs, wasn't woke, they would have won the Gold Medal instead of the Bronze. Woke means you lose, everything that is woke goes bad, and our soccer team certainly has," the 75-year-old said.
The world champions had just beaten Australia 4-3 to secure third place, propelled to victory by talisman double goalsccorer Megan Rapinoe -- a touchstone for LGBT activism known for her brightly-dyed, choppy hairstyle.
But Trump was in no mood to congratulate Rapinoe, one of several gay players in the team, for a hard-fought medal in what could well be her swansong tournament before retirement.
"They should replace the wokesters with Patriots and start winning again," Trump fumed.
"The woman with the purple hair played terribly and spends too much time thinking about Radical Left politics and not doing her job!"
The spat is nothing new. Rapinoe, who starred in the United States' 2019 World Cup triumph, has long been an outspoken Trump critic, referring to him in an interview with Vice TV last year as a "white nationalist."
And in June 2019 Trump lambasted the star for saying she wouldn't visit the White House as long as he was the occupant.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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