I Won A Gold Medal And All I Got Was This Lousy Burger Party - Minnesota Wild

The Minnesota Wild had all the momentum in the world when Jack Hughes put a puck past Jordan Binnington in overtime to clinch Team USA's Gold Medal.

Each member of both teams got to play a hero at some point. Matt Boldy scored the opening goal. Brock Faber was the lone defenseman on 1:23 of a 1:32 5-on-3 penalty kill that didn't allow Canada to score. Quinn Hughes scored a point in that game and every other one in the Olympics. USA/Wild General manager Bill Guerin was the architect of the team, and coach John Hynes was in charge of an 18-for-18 penalty kill.

That Gold Medal may as well have been Minnesota's, and the State of Hockey was looking worthy of that marketing slogan. Hughes has made the Wild as relevant as ever nationally, leading the charge for a team that went 16-5-5 in between the star defenseman's debut and the Olympic break. With another chance to load up near the trade deadline, the Wild were poised to seize on this rise in relevance and popularity.

Then they decided to shoot themselves in the foot, repeatedly. The bad PR decisions started right away. First, Guerin brought good friend, FBI Director, and (do we have to say "alleged"?) Jeffrey Epstein cover-up stooge Kash Patel in the locker room to put on a Gold Medal and celebrate as if he was out with The Boys blocking shots, absorbing Tom Wilson hits, and losing teeth. In an instant, Guerin allowed the conversation to go from a historic win to another culture war flashpoint.

The GM of Team USA also managed to rope the Women's team into this. I can understand that rich, sheltered players who may or may not have formed a political worldview see taking a congratulatory phone call from the President as an apolitical act. I can believe when the Men's players say they respect and support their Women counterparts, despite going along with a needlessly cruel shot at the Gold Medal winners, as well as half the population.

What I have a hard time comprehending is how Guerin, or any of the other adults in the room, would allow these moments to be recorded and inevitably distributed. What was the upside of putting the players in a position to talk about Patel? What outcome was Guerin hoping for in allowing his squad's reactions to a man known for saying things that bring heat on himself and others to be documented? What was the point of taking the focus from the team, or even the country, and putting it on an unpopular government?

A large portion of the blame for this falls directly on Guerin's shoulders, but it's important not to let the players off the hook here. Quinn Hughes has voiced no reservations about going to the State of the Union at Donald Trump's invitation. "Yeah, we're excited to go. It's not something you get to do every Tuesday," he told * Good Morning America*. Hughes was also presumably excited to wear a

Trump hat(Sorry! It's out of stock in red!) and

take a photowith White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Boldy and Faber appear disinclined to comment on the situation, but their attendance at the State of the Union is neither usual nor apolitical. As noted on Monday, the speech comes at a time when Trump is disastrously underwater in approval ratings and looking to glom onto anything that could give his image a boost. Associating himself with a winning team burnishes his image, and attendance at an event of overtly political theatre, as opposed to a routine visit to the White House, has to be taken as an endorsement.

This context can not be divorced from Operation Metro Surge, the paramilitary invasion of 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents to the Twin Cities and surrounding areas, which has illegally detained many and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The federal government -- the one Patel represents and Trump spearheads -- is operating a soft siege of the state, already costing its citizens over $100 million. Compounding that is the decision, announced two days after Boldy, Faber, and Hughes attended Trump's speech, to freeze Medicaid funding, further attacking the pocketbooks of Minnesotans.

These are all players making $7 million or more annually. They're very wealthy and very sheltered, and perhaps not incredibly invested in politics. I don't really buy that they can be sheltered from recent events to a degree that lets them off the hook from associating themselves with the federal government. Even if they somehow have been uninformed, it's probably on their agents to pull them aside and say, Maybe don't be a willing prop for an administration 60% of Minnesotans disapprove.

Especially since politely declining (for whatever reason) has brought little to no heat on the Women's team, Kyle Connor, Jake Guentzel, Jackson LaCombe, Brock Nelson, or Jake Oettinger.

But look! When you get invited by the President, you take your super-cool trip. It's not about politics, as the players claimed. "Everything is so political," bemoaned Jack Hughes, who was also photographed in a Trump hat while posing with Leavitt. "We're athletes, we're so proud to represent the U.S."

Captain Auston Matthews said on his attendance, "I think it's something that you do because we are proud Americans and whatever your political beliefs may be, hopefully something like this will hopefully bring more unity to the country and stuff like that."

And they were right. It wasn't about politics. It was about something greater, more unifying. It was about Burger. The Boys attended the State of the Union and were rewarded with what every young child who ever won a sporting event dreams of: Burger.

This is America's Last Supper, the decayed Ronald McDonald shoes of Ozymandias wasting away in the desert.

It's important to see the decline from the happier days of the Burgerreich. Back in 2019, Trump had the happiest day of his life, hosting Alabama's Tide National Championship team with Burger. These things seem the same on paper. Seeing them reveals another story.

The Official White House photo (taken by Joyce N. Boghosian) says it all:

There's showmanship here. The Filet-O-Fishes and Dave's Singles are artfully stacked. The splendor that Abraham Lincoln is casting a befuddled gaze upon might be crude, it might be low culture, and it is incredibly mockable. But it is splendor.

His excitement at meeting the big football players of Alabama might be a document of the last moment that Trump has felt truly alive. "It's going to be very interesting to see at the end of this evening how many are left," the President declares as a content-seeming Tide rolls through the buffet line. He excitedly details the breadth of his wonder. "We have pizzas, 300 hamburgers. Many, many fries!"

Instead, the United States men's team is given a front-row seat to witness a country that cannot even do Burger anymore. Burger is dead. You'll have a double cheeseburger, and you will like it. The many, many fries? They are absent from the table.

Also absent from this 10-second film is Trump himself, who appears to have no interest in admiring the big hockey guys, or in how much of his sad feast will remain. Boldy contemplates his too-big bite of McDonald's next to an unenthused Faber, while Quinn Hughes -- apolitical as ever -- appears to chat it up with Minnesota Congressman Tom Emmer, who also seems to have little issue with the federal government invading his home.

Their apparent theme song, the late Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue," rings out. It's doubtful that these connections were consciously made, but it is incredibly interesting that a song that was wildly popular in the lead-up to the War in Iraq is the rallying cry of this team, in this moment. Trump, who landed blows on Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton's Iraq War support in his rise to the Presidency, used the State of the Union to shill for war with Iran.

The jingoistic, swaggering anthem serves as an unintentional underline to the team's endorsement of the Administration. Like Trump's Presidency, war in Iran is massively unpopular, supported by 27% of adult citizens vs. the 49% who oppose it, according to The Economist and YouGov. Every apparently apolitical act just so happens to further an unpopular agenda. Weird coincidence!

The flipside of the Michael Jordan quote, "Republicans buy sneakers, too," is that the rest of the country does, too. And so do the rest of Minnesotans, the team Guerin, Boldy, Faber, and Hughes represent. The 60% of Minnesotans who do not enjoy having the federal government occupying their city, kidnapping their neighbors, and murdering civilians buy tickets to Wild games. They buy Boldy, Faber, and especially the Hughes jerseys that are flying off the shelves. They're generating buzz and expressing interest in the team.

This is a demographic the Wild should be interested in appealing to. Instead, management and the players have gone out of their way to alienate them. In embroiling his team into this mess of an administration, Guerin foolishly traded away the goodwill his team should have brought to Minnesota.

On the other hand, they got... Burger. The saddest, most disappointing Burger Party that ever existed. That doesn't feel like a fair and equitable trade to me, but I guess that's why I'm not an NHL GM.

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