Bill Plaschke, the longtime Los Angeles Times columnist, published a broadside last week demanding that the Dodgers reverse course and cancel their second White House visit under President Trump. He called the back-to-back World Series champions "tone deaf," labeled the trip "an insult to their fans," and warned the organization it would leave Washington as "two-time losers." The column reads less like sports journalism and more like a political pressure campaign dressed in a press credential.

The Dodgers won their second consecutive title, the first repeat champions in 25 years, and accepted the president's invitation to celebrate at the White House. The team is scheduled to visit on July 23, marking a return trip after their April 2025 ceremony in the East Room. White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said President Trump "is excited to welcome the Los Angeles Dodgers BACK to the White House to celebrate their World Series championship."

That excitement is apparently intolerable to Plaschke, who wants the Dodgers to snub the president on behalf of what he considers the team's core audience.

Plaschke's case, and its contradictions

The column, critiqued by OutKick's Jon in a detailed rebuttal, builds its argument on three pillars: ICE enforcement in Los Angeles, the legacy of Jackie Robinson, and the example set by championship teams that declined Trump's invitation. Each one collapses under the weight of its own logic.

Plaschke wrote that Trump "rained terror on Los Angeles with the midsomer ICE raids that changed the lives of thousands." He argued that many of those affected were Dodgers fans, describing the franchise as having "arguably the largest immigrant fan base in sports." The conclusion: accepting a White House invitation amounts to betraying those fans.

"Why in the hell do they insist on embracing the person trying to tear this city apart?"

Set aside the loaded language. The underlying claim is that immigration enforcement, the lawful removal of people who entered or remained in the country illegally, is an attack on a baseball team's fans. Plaschke conflates legal residents and citizens of immigrant backgrounds with illegal immigrants targeted by ICE operations. It is a rhetorical move that erases the distinction between lawful and unlawful presence, a distinction that matters to most Americans and certainly to the millions of immigrants who followed the rules.

As Jon noted in his rebuttal, the Obama administration deported illegal immigrants on a significant scale as well. Nobody at the LA Times demanded the Dodgers boycott the Obama White House.

The Jackie Robinson comparison

Plaschke's most provocative claim invoked the Dodgers' most sacred figure. He wrote:

"An organization cannot boast of sharing a uniform with Jackie Robinson while sharing a very public afternoon with President Trump."

This is an extraordinary assertion. Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947, an act of courage that expanded American freedom. Plaschke's column treats a routine championship ceremony at the White House as morally incompatible with that legacy. The implication is that visiting the duly elected president of the United States is somehow an offense against racial justice.

The Dodgers themselves have said the visit is "simply showing respect for the country, the presidency, and not an endorsement of Trump." That framing tracks with how championship visits have worked across administrations of both parties for decades. Plaschke wants to rewrite the tradition so that only visits to presidents who pass a progressive litmus test are acceptable.

Meanwhile, the same Dodgers organization hosted an LGBTQ+ Pride Night that Jon described as an insult to Christians and Catholics, an event Plaschke apparently found no reason to question. The columnist's moral compass appears to spin freely depending on which constituency he is trying to please.

The teams that said no, and what Plaschke left out

Plaschke held up three championship teams as models of resistance:

"The 2017 NBA champion Golden State Warriors wouldn't go. The 2018 Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles wouldn't go. The 2025 NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder wouldn't go. And now this group of Dodgers are going twice?"

What Plaschke did not mention is that the Warriors' refusal was led by Steve Kerr and Steph Curry, both of whom later endorsed Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Their boycott was not a principled stand above politics. It was a political act by political actors who happened to coach and play basketball. Plaschke apparently never questioned whether their partisanship was "tone deaf" to Warriors fans who voted differently.

The Dodgers, by contrast, chose to honor the office. Clayton Kershaw, who posed with the president and owner Mark Walter at the April 2025 visit, put it plainly during that earlier ceremony:

"Getting to go to the White House, getting to see the Oval Office, getting to meet the president of the United States, that's stuff that you can't lose sight of, no matter what you believe."

That is a grown-up answer. It reflects the view that the presidency is bigger than any single occupant and that a championship visit is a civic tradition, not a campaign rally. Kershaw's perspective got almost no attention from the same press corps that amplified every player who refused to go.

The real "insult to fans"

Plaschke's column assumes that Dodgers fans are a political monolith, that they uniformly oppose the president and his immigration policies. This is the kind of assumption that media figures in coastal cities make reflexively, and it reveals far more about the columnist's bubble than about the fan base he claims to speak for.

Los Angeles is a large, complicated city. Its residents include legal immigrants who waited years for visas, small-business owners crushed by crime and disorder, and working families who care about border security. California's own leaders have spent months deflecting accountability for the state's problems onto the federal government. Plaschke's column fits neatly into that pattern: blame Trump, ignore the failures closer to home.

Jon's rebuttal pointed out that if Plaschke wanted to identify who was "tearing the city apart," he might look at figures like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom before pointing at the White House. That line of inquiry, of course, would require the LA Times to scrutinize its own political allies, an exercise the paper has shown little appetite for.

Not every Dodger is on board with the visit. Kiké Hernández told reporters he will skip the July 23 trip, citing a minor-league rehab assignment for an oblique strain. But Hernández admitted he "probably wouldn't have gone" even if healthy. He attended the 2024 ceremony but said afterward he "wasn't really interested in talking to" the president. That is his right. Individual players can make their own choices. The difference is that Hernández is not demanding the entire organization conform to his politics.

Plaschke is.

A pattern, not an outlier

This column does not exist in isolation. It is part of a broader pattern in which media figures and progressive institutions treat any cooperation with the Trump administration as a moral failing. Championship visits become loyalty tests. Routine governance becomes an outrage. Legal victories for the administration on immigration are treated as emergencies rather than the ordinary functioning of constitutional government.

The same dynamic played out when Trump congratulated the Dodgers on their repeat title. The president posted on Truth Social, calling the team "incredible CHAMPIONS" and noting that "a lesser group of men would never have been able to win that game." A straightforward congratulation. Yet even that gesture became a source of Democratic discomfort, with Sen. Alex Padilla skipping the previous ceremony and Trump pointedly declining to introduce Democratic senators present at the event.

The NBA champion New York Knicks have also accepted a White House invitation, suggesting that the supposed norm of boycotting Trump is far less universal than columnists like Plaschke pretend. The president has shown no hesitation in hosting allies and partners across sports, diplomacy, and governance, and the invitations keep getting accepted.

Plaschke closed his column with a plea:

"It's not too late. The Dodgers still have time to change their minds and do the right thing."

He added that the team could walk into "the most celebrated residence in America as two time defending champions. But they would leave as two-time losers."

The Dodgers, so far, have not budged. Good for them. The franchise has chosen to honor a civic tradition that predates the current political hysteria and will outlast it. That is not tone-deaf. It is the sound of an organization that refuses to let a columnist's politics dictate how it celebrates an achievement its players earned on the field.

Whether the subject is sports, diplomacy, or executive action, the pattern holds: the loudest objections to normal civic engagement with this president come from people who never accepted the last election in the first place. The Dodgers don't owe them a boycott. They owe their fans a championship, and they delivered two.