- It shouldn't be hard, as the White House made it, to say the US will participate in the Winter Olympics.
- It's important that the US participate as a show of solidarity with the host country, South Korea.
- Eventually, the White House found a way to say we are going.
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The Trump administration's waffling on going to the Olympics is unfair to South Korea
Opinion: It shouldn't be hard, as the White House made it, to say the US will participate in the Winter Olympics.
Is it really that hard to say the US will participate in the Winter Olympics?
I can't figure out whether UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders created a controversy about US participation in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea on purpose or by accident. But they shouldn't have done it.*
On Tuesday, Haley called US participation in the Olympics an "open question." But the rest of her answer to Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum made it sound like she expected the US to go as usual, while taking security precautions.
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It's always theoretically possible that some future event would cause the US to pull out of an Olympic games. Maybe Haley's "open question" comment was just an off-the-cuff way of acknowledging the unknown of the future, not a statement she intended to raise the prospect that the US was seriously questioning whether to go to PyeongChang.
But then on Thursday, Sanders, who should have realized that she might be asked about Haley's comments, said "no official decision" had been made about US participation. And then, after her press briefing, she tweeted to clarify that the US "
* I am a paid contributor to MSNBC and NBC News, so I should note that NBC holds the US broadcast rights to the Olympics. Of course, NBC exercises no editorial oversight of my writing for Business Insider.
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