You get only so many headlines in the run-up to a World Cup, and the women used much of their media coverage to draw added attention to the gender-discrimination lawsuit they filed against the United States Soccer Federation. Likewise, Ms. Rapinoe has deftly fused her athletic prowess with politics and used her ever-growing fame to draw fans’ attention toward the issues that matter to her and the sport. She’s fought for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and knelt in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick. She’s also used her success to support development camps that help draw young women into her sport.

She’s turned her fame into a platform, which is a word we seem to use endlessly these days. (The social networks are platforms, the news media’s a platform, so is the presidency. You, me — all of us are tiny platforms!) But the word is crucial in understanding this team’s particular achievement. It’s a word Ms. Rapinoe uses herself time and again to discuss activism. “I have no interest in extending our platform to him,” she said to Sports Illustrated in May in reference to a potential White House visit. After similar comments went viral during the tournament, prompting a rebuke from President Trump on Twitter, she expanded on the idea:

Considering how much time and effort and pride we take in the platform that we have, and using it for good, and for leaving the game in a better place and hopefully the world in a better place, I don’t think that I would want to go, and I would encourage my teammates to think hard about lending that platform or having that co-opted by an administration that doesn’t feel the same way and fight for the same things we fight for.

Ms. Rapinoe’s words reflect an innate understanding of the way information travels and is received — essentially, the entire media ecosystem. She knows the power of her platform, but she also knows how it can be hijacked and undermined.

Better yet, Ms. Rapinoe and the rest of the team know how to set the terms of engagement and stay on the offensive — they force their ideological opposition to respond and often make them look petty and weak. In a wonderful piece, the Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins described the effect of this mind-set as the team’s “pursuing an insurrection in which its opponents are actually its secret teammates.”

This strategy — essentially, “have your enemies do your work for you” — makes Ms. Rapinoe and her teammates an excellent foil to a president with an oxygen-sucking gift for commandeering attention. Mr. Trump’s ability to hijack platforms and turn unrelated discussions into fights about him has scrambled the brains of his political opponents. The traditional approaches — fact-checking, for instance — are defensive; they require lending some portion of your platform (and attention) to the hijacker. The press has figured this out the hard way during the Trump administration. Batting down falsehoods and conspiracy theories requires meeting the president on his terms and playing into the oppositional role Mr. Trump has cast for the media.

The women’s team refused to play the role. In doing so, it occupied what Jenny Odell, the author of “How to Do Nothing,” a recent book on resisting the attention economy, calls “a third space.” This positioning, she explains, means neither submitting to a demand for attention nor blindly refusing it, but negating the terms of the demand. And “true resistance,” Odell writes, is “the ability not just to “withdraw attention but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it.”