Donald Trump started off the weekend by formally rescinding (via tweet) his invitation for Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors to visit the White House after their N.B.A. Finals win. Curry said on Saturday that he and many of his teammates would be voting against going when they sat down to make the decision, telling reporters that not going would send the message “that we don’t stand for basically what our president has—the things that he’s said and the things that he hasn’t said at the right times—that we won’t stand for it.”

Later Saturday, Curry’s rival in the last two Finals, LeBron James, backed his on-court adversary, calling Trump a bum in a tweet, and pointing out that one can’t really rescind an invite after it’s been rejected.

Curry is are not the first member of the athletic community who has angered Trump.On Friday night, at a rally in Alabama, arguably the college football capital of the planet, Trump ranted against the number of N.F.L. players who have taken a knee during the national anthem—a protest movement stated last season by the now-unemployed quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Elsewhere at the Hunstville rally, Trump railed against everything he felt was “ruining the game” of football, including refs who call too many penalties, and too much attention paid to degenerative brain diseases, for which football is particularly notorious. This came a little more than a week after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called for the firing of ESPN anchor Jemele Hill for calling the president a white supremacist.

In other words: the sports world—where race, media, and wealth converge like few other vectors of the American grid—has become a central, natural battleground of the Trump Era iteration of the culture wars. As with all things Trump, it’s hard to tell if he’s picking his fights strategically, or if this is the get-off-my-lawn-style ranting of a 71-year-old American man. In either case, this is the kind of talk that speaks directly to some of Trump’s most fervent base. It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise to see a lot more protests come Sunday’s slate of N.F.L. games.