President Trump had a golden opportunity this month: using his power as leader, or more properly misleader, of the the world’s richest nation to convince the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), governing body of he world’s most widely followed sport, football, or what in the US is called soccer, to make the US as primary host of this year’s World Cup completion,(along with Canada and Mexico), a shining example of grace, efficiency and fairness.
Best of all, the US this year had a formidable men’s and women’s team, both of which had a real shot at winning the coveted World Cup.
All the president had to do was sit back and watch the games with the rest of the world, and make sure all 80 competing national teams from Brazil to Cape Verde, from Iran to Palestine, and their global fans are treated fairly.
Unfortunately, but sadly unexpectedly, that’s not what the president did.
First, he allowed his thuggish Homeland Security Department to impose severe restrictions on the Iranian mens’ team, who were required to find accommodations in Mexico and then fly to their various matches in the US, allegedly for “national security reasons,” Also ludicrously barred entry to the US (despite his already having an approved US visa in his passport) was Omar Artan, a prominent Somali referee. After spending a week in detention because of DHS “suspicions” of a terrorist connection,” he was deported back to his home country, where he received a heroes’ welcome.
Countless other foreign fans, mostly from Muslim countries, found themselves similarly denied entry to the US, causing them to lose the money they had paid for FIFA’s obscenely overpriced tickets.
Trump, as President, could obviously have put a stop to these outrages by his own out-of-control border control and immigration apparatus, but he did nothing.
Don’t imagine that Trump, not a man known for his work ethic, was simply too busy for such micromanagement. If that were the case, how to explain what he did next after the key scorer on the US men’s soccer team, Folarin Balogun, fouled a player in a knockout round against Bosnia-Herzegovina? That foul drew him a non-appealable Red Card that led automatically to his being banned from the US team’s next test, the game against highly ranked Belgium.
The sports analysts on TV and in print were all saying the loss of their key offensive player was a big blow to the USA team’s chances against the much better Belgian team. So Trump decided to shuffle in. He initially said nothing about his calling FIFA President Gianni Infantino. But when Infantino admitted to the Guardian that the US president had importuned him in three phone calls, all asking him to revoke the penalty so Balogun could play in his team’s next match, Trump admitted he had made a phone call to FIFA President Gianni Infantino, saying, “All I did was ask for a review, because I didn’t think it was a foul. I didn’t tell him what to do; I can’t tell him what to do.”
Realizing that nobody was believing his assertion that three calls from the president of the world’s most powerful nation w]should not be considered any kind of pressure by the recipient on the other end of the call, he switched to bragging about his unseemly and unsportsmanlike conduct, seeking instead to take credit for having succeeded in getting the Red Card ban lifted.
“I’m the one who got them to do it,” he boasted, telling reporters in the Oval Office, “I’ve never seen anything like it. That wasn’t a foul. That wasn’t even an infraction. That was two guys running full speed that happened to crash into each other.”
He went on to say that because of his efforts on behalf of Balogun and the US team, “We’re going to have a full team and Belgium is going to have a full team, and you know what, if they beat us, then they can be really proud. The other way, if they beat us, I say it was rigged, just like the [Biden] election was rigged in 2020.”
Meanwhile, the result—no surprise— of the president’s blatant interference in the World Cup finals on behalf of the US team was a disaster. The Belgian team and their fans were furious, making them more than ever determined to win in the face of Trump’s unseemly pressure.
The US team and Balogun himself (who had not sought a reversal of his ban) seemed dispirited on the pitch in their contest, with the carded team star not making even the US side’s one goal despite the US coach’s ill-thought-out decision to include him in the starting line-up and to leave him on the field for most of the game.
Some players were quoted as saying they thought Balogun should have stayed seated on the bench to protest Trump’s interference.
When the game ended, the victorious Belgian team made their opinion of Trump crystal clear as they all ran out on the field and mocked the US president by aping the dopey hip-swaying, tiny fist-pumping dance he does when, during his droning speeches, he runs out things to brag about or people to blame for his manifold failings. Meanwhile, Romelo Lukaku, the DRC Congo native whose powerful fourth shot past the US goalie added an exclamation point to the Belgian win and the US Team’s ignominious exit from the World Cup competition, did his own victory dance mouthing the words “Overturn this!“
In front of the entire world, Trump single-handedly transformed this rare opportunity for the US to shine as gracious host of this massive sports event into a shit show.
Of course, this is nothing new. Since returning to the White House a year and a half ago, Trump has been on a tear, destroying a nation that, while still deeply flawed, has over the course of its history, made considerable strides in moving from a slave-owning society ruled by white men to a racially mixed one in which there was at least legally equal rights for people of all races, creeds snd sexual orientation.
He has destroyed—or tried to destroy—Iran, an ancient civilization and one that has not launched a war of aggression and conquest since it broke away from the Neo-colonial domination of Russia, Britain and the US.
He has tried to topple Venezuela, kidnapping its elected leader with the express goal of expropriating (stealing) its oil and other valuable minerals, and is threatening to do the same in Cuba, a nation he is trying to destroy by blocking all oil and gas imports.
He has gutted the US Constitution, brazenly violating all of the Bill of Rights Amendments save the Second, which grants the right to own guns.
He is openly trying to rig the upcoming US national election, claiming that if he is blocked from doing so, the Republican Party will be destroyed (along with his goal of ruling as a tyrant through 2028 and beyond).
Most recently, in league with Israel, he launched a completely illegal war against Iran–a conflict that has destabilized the whole Middle East, caused energy prices to soar and killed thousands of Iranians, including at its start an elementary school of over 100 young girls and their teachers. It is a widely unpopular war among Americans and one that he has never offered a coherent reason for, despite its $132-billion cost to consumers and taxpayers since late March.
And then there’s his transforming and enlarging the immigration enforcement personnel of the Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into a national police force intended to terrorize, arrest, detain or deport and even kill immigrants and their US citizen defenders.
Finally, he has thoroughly corrupted the federal government agencies, departments and other branches of government—the Supreme Court and many of he lower federal courts,, both Houses of Congress, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Pentagon, FBI, etc., and destroyed others like the National Institutes of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and gutted care for the poor and elderly.
Looking at the endless wreckage being wreaked almost daily, nationally and globally, by this epic ignoramus, readers may wonder why even waste time condemning his failed effort to rig the FIFA World Cup Competition? After all, nobody’s dying because of his efforts; countries whose teams might have lost because of his Department of Homeland Security’s interference with their right to participate equally in the games in the US haven’t been physically harmed.
But that’s why this latest brazen example of presidential bullying, this overreach, shameless dishonesty, self-importance by our toad-like and thuggish national leader, is so important to look at.
In most of the cases of Trump’s presidential abuse of power, the consequences are and have been so awful that the focus is on that and his victims’ suffering, while the sheer grossness of Trump’s behavior, the display of his pathological narcissism, and sociopathy, his lack of empathy and of respect for rules, laws and traditions, is ignored.
Because this was the unvarnished Trump on display, flaunting his power, unconcerned about who gets hurt, just so long as he gets his way, even if it’s just by cheating to help his favored team win, even if it is in a sport that by his own admission he doesn’t particularly like, follow or understand.
Surely it’s the least one should expect of the head of a gigantic nation — the richest in the world— to plan ahead—including for contingencies— to ensure a spectacular celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday. One would expect this to be so especially when the president of said country, Donald Trump, is one who lives for spectacles, so that he can focus on his own wonderfulness.
After all, the quarter-millennium anniversary of the signing and printing of the US Declaration of Independence was not a surprise. The Trump White House has known (and was surely salivating over the thought since he won his second term as president on Nov. 6, 2024), that he was going to have the opportunity to show off and take credit for the virtues of the remarkable nation whose leadership he was in charge of.
Incredibility, and yet predictably, President Trump has failed not just miserably, but spectacularly at this seemingly straight-forward task. In fact, everything this gold-obsessed whack-job of a chief executive has touched having to do with this special celebration, has shown him to have a reverse Midas touch: Everything he touches turns not to gold but to shit.
For starters, look at the White House itself, which now resembles a war veteran home from a war with his left arm blown off at the shoulder. This is because Trump, instead of going about his scheme to enlarge the former executive office building the ‘People’s House,” in the proper way by putting his plans through t the process of the Washington Historical Commission review to assure the new ballroom he wanted would be aesthetically appropriate, he just tore the whole East Wing down, leaving the White House looking like the scene of a 9-Richter-scale Earthquake with no hope of building something new in time for the July 4 celebration or even the November off-year election.
From there, he turned his malevolent Shit-Touch hands to enshittifying the Reflecting Pool that for over a century has graced the space on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument (where hundreds of thousands of protesters left and right, over that period, have cooled their feet in hot weather).
Wanting, on an ill-conceived whim, to have the 2000-foot long pool, which has been looking a sickly green of late because of out-of-control algae blooms, to look “American Flag” blue, he turned to a company with no experience in such a project and gave them a no-bid-contract, with predictable results. The company painted the granite-lined pool blue without doing any surface preparation and within days, huge sheets of dark-blue latex were seen floating around in the water, which unsurprisingly was also covered anew with green algae. The entire pool, for the four-day national holiday, was fenced off along with most of the rest of the mall.
Not willing to accept the blame for this fiasco, Trump had the US Park Service arrest people who were seen recorded on surveillance video kneeling near the water, who will now have to prove they were not ‘treasonously’ sabotaging the president’s pet project. Actually, according to news reports, he damage to the pool’s paint job may well have been precipitated by the president’s own decision to have a presidential motorcade drive onto the just-painted empty pool to inspect the result of the project. The heavy vehicles’ tire treads were seen to have pulled the paint material loose allowing water to seep under the coating.
(I thought of the reflecting pool fiasco as I was in Rome a few weeks ago and saw the ancient fountains with their white marble construction, and their crystal water and wondered why Trump even wanted the pool water in it to look blue.
Water, of course is clear, not blue. Maybe the guy has never seen outdoor bodies of water except in swimming pools.)
Meanwhile, Trump’s grand plans for a right-wing country music themed music fest and brutal cage fighting competition on the White House Lawn, also proved to be shitty failures, In the case of the music festival, the event was called off because because nearly all the invited entertainers ended up bowing out when they discovered they’d been lied too that the event would be apolitical, when it turned out it would be focused on celebrating Trump and the Republicans, and attacking “liberals, Democrats and immigrants.” As for the UFC cage fight event, attendance was reportedly low, the public space on the White House ground floor became a sweatyblocker-room for fight contestants, and the outdoor event was hot as an oven.
Weather didn’t cooperate with Trump either for the actual July 4th weekend events, with heat forcing a halt to a planned military parade including tanks, and a much touted planned “Guinness-Record-making” fireworks display had to be postponed because of thunderstorms and health-threatening temperatures. (When they were finally staged, the resulting shower of cardboard and paper from the resulting explosions mostly ended up falling into th Reflecting Pool, where they became a mushy paper mache mess that had to be cleaned up.
Didn’t the thought of a inclement weather risk figure into Trump’s planning for the big 250th Independence Day Celebration? The District of Columbia has five covered all-weather sports arenas, as well as one more where the seats are mostly covered. My guess is the president, whose poll numbers continue to sink, wanted to have the White House-sponsored events to at least appear well attended and he feared holding them in a sports arena would take much of the focus off of him, and worse, any poor attendance would be obvious.
Anyhow, instead of a music festival and later an evening of fireworks, those who came to D.C. for the two big events instead were “treated” to another long meandering speech by Trump himself featuring much self-praise, and attacks on his “enemies.”
My hope is the fiasco of Trump’s ciumsy effort to rig the US-Belgium playoff game will outrage most Americans, and certainly all those who support the idea of fair play in sports. Hopefully, his boorishness, incompetence and the way his embarrassing failure was mocked on a billion TV screens worldwide, will help turn the tide against him decisively, even among former voters.
