Gold Medaling in the Culture War
Plus: Trump turns a murder into a punchline.
Fear and Loathing at the Paris Games
—Andrew Egger
What a day it was at the Olympics yesterday. Katie Ledecky becoming the most decorated female American Olympian ever. Simone Biles completing her triumphant comeback to win individual all-around gold and (further) cement her legacy as the greatest of all time. It was the kind of stuff that makes you proud to be an American.
But you’d have to forgive the Olympics-watchers in the online MAGAsphere if they happened to miss all that. They had their eyes on an entirely different event: a preliminary matchup in women’s light welterweight boxing between Algeria and Italy.
The Thursday contest between Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Italy’s Angela Carini lasted only seconds. Carini took one punch and put up her hand to forfeit.
That would have been that, except for one detail: Last year, the International Boxing Association—the sport’s highest governing body—had abruptly disqualified Khelif hours before a championship bout, alleging she had failed a gender eligibility test. The specifics of that test are unclear. Some news reports at the time suggested Khelif had elevated levels of testosterone, while the president of IBA alleged in Russian media that the test had found her to have XY chromosomes.
That was enough for right-wing politicians and media personalities—primed by years of crusading against transgender participation in women’s sports—to make Khelif their villain of the day. Donald Trump and JD Vance both posted about the bout, with Vance condemning “a grown man pummeling a woman in a boxing match.”
“The Olympics allow men to beat up women,” wrote Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik.
“Kamala Harris is in favor of women like Angela Carini getting abused and brutalized by men who think they are women,” thundered Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. Viral posts mockingly recirculated an old tweet from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro: “Trans women are women, pass it on.”
Lost in all this noise was a simple fact: Khelif is not transgender. She was born a girl and raised as a girl in Algeria. It’s a country not exactly known for its expansive views on LBGT issues: homosexuality is illegal and gender-transition medicine is banned.
What’s actually going on here is difficult to discern. In part, that’s because the IBA isn’t necessarily a reliable narrator: In fact, it is a corrupt enough organization that the International Olympic Committee earlier this year stripped it of its role overseeing boxing at the Paris games. The tests that disqualified Khelif (and another boxer, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting) last year were highly unusual, coming as they did in mid-competition. And it’s still not totally clear on what criteria they were even tested. The IBA said this week that “the athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential.”
In a statement yesterday, the IOC said the IBA’s testing decision had not given Khelif and Lin appropriate due process. Hence why they were permitted to compete.
“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure,” the statement said, “especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.”
But even assuming it is true that Khelif was born with XY chromosomes, it would mean not that Khelif is a man, but that she had been born intersex—in other words, with biology not fitting neatly into the male/female binary. Some intersex people—those with Swyer syndrome, for instance—are anatomically female but chromosomally male.
You get the idea: The whole situation is complicated and opaque. If Khelif does have XY chromosomes, it’s perfectly possible she has genetic advantages other women lack, and it’s perfectly reasonable for the bodies overseeing a violent sport like boxing to have rules governing or even limiting such edge cases.
But it’s nothing short of insane to be making Khelif herself—a person who, I cannot stress enough, has lived as a woman from the moment of her birth—into a villain for wanting to participate in women’s sports. Or to argue that a president should be directly intervening in these matters.
Imagine how jarring this week must be for Khelif: You lace up to do the same thing you’ve been doing for years and suddenly find yourself a figure of fear and loathing halfway around the world. The culture war is fast becoming America’s primary export.
Assassination Schtick
—A.B. Stoddard
It has been difficult to watch half the country support Donald Trump’s bid to return to the presidency, after he attempted to steal an election and overthrow the government. Trump voters forgive an insurrection despite the fact that he hasn’t evolved or renounced his transgressions. But we were reminded this week that he is also sick, demented on a personal level, too.
In a new book, Trump’s nephew Fred Trump III describes a conversation he had with the former president about medical expenses for his disabled son. “I don’t know,” he recalled Trump saying. “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move to Florida.”
On Wednesday, Trump went to the National Association of Black Journalists conference and said many offensive things. Among them, he could not utter one word of empathy or compassion for the police officers injured at the riot at the Capitol. Instead, he filibustered about being a victim of political persecution.
Later that night, Trump rallied in Pennsylvania for the first time since the attempt on his life there on July 13. He thanked doctors at Butler Memorial Hospital and honored Corey Comperatore, the man who was killed that day.
Then came this little gem: Trump told the crowd that a friend recently gave Comperatore’s widow Helen Comperatore a check for a million dollars.
“But you know what Corey’s wife said?” Trump went on. “‘I’d rather have my husband.’ Isn’t that good? I know a lot of wives that would not say that, I’m sorry. They would not say that.”
It was a bit. Trumpian humor. People laughed nervously, as his rallygoers do when they know he needs their approval.
Trump moved on, praising Comperatore and his family again, holding a moment of silence. But the ghoulish moment lingered. Trump, who now routinely declares “I took a bullet for democracy” after one grazed his ear, had made a laugh line out of the wife whose husband was shot to death at his rally.
Catching up . . .
The jobs report today was suboptimal, with the U.S. economy adding just 114,000 jobs last month. Jerome Powell is on notice: CNN
A secret CIA investigation indicated Egypt’s president sought to illegally inject $10 million into Trump’s 2016 campaign. The DOJ was blocked from seeking key records to determine if Trump took the money: WaPo
The incredible backstory behind The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich’s release from a Russian prison: WSJ
Anatomy of a so-called Scam PAC: The Bulwark, baby!
A deep dive into Project 2025: Politico
Quick Hits
Money, it’s a drag . . .
Trump likely assumed he was going to tail out of July with a big fundraising advantage over Joe Biden. But Biden’s candidacy is no more and that fundraising advantage is now a severe deficit. The former president announced his campaign and authorized committees raised $138.7 million in the month of July. By contrast, Kamala Harris announced this morning that her campaign had raised an eye-popping $310 million. Maybe the crazier stat: more than two million Harris donors were making their first donation of the cycle this month.
Speaking of eye-popping . . .
How about this Simone Biles tweet:
Or maybe this video, in which Kyle Rittenhouse explains he won’t back Trump because the ex-president is—we kid you not—“bad on the 2nd Amendment”:
Or Snoop Dogg’s latest act:
A picture says a thousand words . . .
Donald Trump, still trying to raise doubts about Kamala Harris’s racial identity, posted a photo yesterday of her in Indian garb with members of her mother’s side of the family. This isn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes-level sleuthing from Trump. In fact, it’s pretty easy to find pictures of a young Harris also hanging out with her Jamaican family members. Try Google. Too much work? Here’s one for ya.
Cheap Shots
If you watched the return of the freed Americans last night, and unless your heart is made of stone, who didn’t have tears in their eyes at the homecoming scenes and how much it meant to those people to do something that we take for granted every day – set foot on American soil?
It was powerful and moving. It is evidence of how important it is to have a statesman, not a narcissist, at the helm. And it is a timely reminder of the significance of having allied nations in the world who will step up to help us when we need them, as opposed to having to go it alone if an isolationist President and government turn their back on those other countries, which will remember it and leave us to fix our problems by ourselves.
We thrive in the global community when we honor our treaties, keep our word, and work together in collaborative leadership. Most assuredly those friendly nations do not want for us to return to the dark days of a Trump administration. Maybe America should listen and learn as to why. Clearly, it matters. Yesterday, while the former President tried to make it about himself, we were our best selves as we took care of our own and worked with our friends to finalize a deal that made us look a little more humane, compassionate, and just plain better around the world, and which made us feel proud to be who we are. It is a temporary reprieve as long as Putin continues to take hostages and our internal enemies are willing to surrender to his agenda. But it also reminded us of our power to be better than that -- if we collectively are strong enough to demand it.
Thank you for a truthful explanation of the women’s boxing issue