Updated March 5, 2026, 5:31 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump said baseball is “not as hot” right now as it used to be and that the sport does “things wrong.”
Musing on sports while welcoming Lionel Messi and MLS champion Inter Miami to the White House on Thursday, March 5, Trump mentioned that when “baseball was hot as a pistol,” he used to sit with late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and watch games.
Trump joked that watching three-hour games with Steinbrenner was the hardest thing he ever had to do. “(Steinbrenner) liked me, I liked him and we both liked nobody else,” Trump said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on what baseball is doing “wrong,” but has previously railed against MLB as “woke.”
In the diatribe about Steinbrenner, Trump shouted out his “friend” Alex Rodriguez, who was in attendance at the event. Rodriguez, who won a World Series title with the Yankees, was one of the greatest players in Major League Baseball history but hasn’t been voted into the Hall of Fame due to his ties to performance-enhancing drugs.
Though Trump boasts in 2026 about his friendship with Rodriguez, he used to excoriate the former MLB star on Twitter before entering the political arena.
Trump called Rodriguez a “druggie” and regularly advocated for the Yankees to terminate his contract. Trump even said that “it was only drugs” that made him a great player.
