“Overturn This!”

Trump manages once again to make the World Cup about him and to ruin everything

Photo courtesy of The Guardian

The U.S. men’s national team lost to Belgium 4-1 in Monday night's World Cup Round of 16 match. But the real story wasn’t that humiliating result. It was everything that happened in the days before the match. It fit a pattern that’s come to define Donald Trump’s second term: inserting himself into something good and ruining everything.

Sen. Ted Cruz inadvertently summed up what was going on. He stood in the Oval Office on Monday to thank Trump for getting FIFA to reverse a suspension of U.S. striker Folarin Balogun, telling the room, “On behalf of all Americans, thank you for getting rid of that ridiculous red card.” Trump grinned and, after a beat of nervous laughter from those in the room, remarked, “That was interesting.”

Cruz didn’t process Trump’s cue to stop talking. “It was spectacular!” Cruz responded. “There was a reason the FIFA trophy stood here for as long as it did.”

Balogun was only eligible to play because FIFA ruled, for the first time since 1962, that a red card issued during a World Cup game did not result in a suspension. Why would it issue such a decision? It turned out Trump had reportedly personally called FIFA President Gianni Infantino and asked him to review the call.

Trump might as well have said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The world reacted with indignation and disbelief. And suddenly, everyone wanted the U.S. to lose. Badly.

For nearly a month before that, none of this had been the vibe. For 24 days, the World Cup had achieved a rare feat: having almost nothing to do with Trump. A co-host nation was falling in love with a sport it had spent decades politely ignoring, and a world of visiting fans was discovering that Americans could, in fact, host a great party. It was going fine. Actually, better than fine.

Then right on cue, in the middle of all that goodwill, Trump made the moment about himself. And that killed the mojo.

What Happened

Bear with me as I pretend, like Trump, that I know anything about soccer.

Per reporting, the foul itself was almost nothing, which helped generate the initial controversy. In an earlier game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, Balogun was trying to get the ball from defender Tarik Muharemović. At full speed, it barely registered. But slowed down on video review, Balogun’s foot was seen raking down the back of Muharemović’s leg and twisting his ankle. The referee flashed a red card.

Under FIFA’s rules, which I admittedly had to look up, that carries an automatic one-match ban. There are no appeals and no exceptions—at least until a certain U.S. president got involved.

And here’s the gag. Balogun regularly plays for Monaco in France. He’s on the U.S. team roster only because of birthright citizenship. As The New Republic reported, Balogun is a U.S. citizen because his mother was deemed too pregnant to fly back to England before he was born. Yes indeedy, Trump intervened for someone he says has no right to be here at all, let alone on the U.S. team.

Once the red card was out, the dispute was supposed to end there. Them’s the rules inside FIFA’s own disciplinary process. Instead, Trump called FIFA President Gianni Infantino directly and asked him to review the call. Then, two days later, surprise, surprise, FIFA announced that Balogun’s ban would not be enforced.

A call that will live in infamy

The world erupted in protest. As Al Jazeera reported, UEFA declared Trump’s ask had “crossed a red line.” Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter asked, “Quo vadis, FIFA?” Belgium’s coach said he hadn’t realized FIFA’s offices celebrated April Fools’ Day in July. Norway’s coach piled on, calling it “a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad decision that will hurt the World Cup.”

One commentator even observed that Trump’s intervention put the entire U.S. team’s participation at risk. “If FIFA is serious about its own statutes, the USA must be suspended from the competition,” wrote Andy Muirhead, arguing that “the third-party non-interference principle is not a suggestion; it is a binding rule,” and that “when a head of state of a World Cup-hosting nation directly intervenes in a disciplinary decision, that is interference.”

For his part, Trump took credit without accepting responsibility. “All I did was ask for a review. I didn’t say, ‘You have to do this,’” he told reporters. “I asked for a review by FIFA. I spoke to a man who’s highly respected… I’m the one who got them to do it,” he said, adding a political dig: “It was not Biden, Biden was asleep!”

Quite rich from the man regularly sleeping through White House press events.

He then added that he “didn’t think it was a foul” at all, an odd assertion given his own admission that he “didn’t know what that meant” when someone first told him about the red card. He also called the referee “very suspect” without elaborating. Asked later what would happen if Belgium won anyway, Trump dragged toxic politics into the match again. “And 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 election was rigged in 2020.”

Moron in the middle

Trump found the lure of the World Cup irresistible, comparing it to multiple simultaneous Super Bowls. It’s the kind of global spotlight that, like the women he boasted about, he simply cannot leave ungrabbed. He had blessedly mostly stayed out of the tournament’s earlier rounds, focused instead on the 250th birthday celebrations for the U.S., an event critics said he had also inserted himself into excessively.

This was not the first time Trump had claimed a sports moment as his own for political reasons. Trump celebrated the U.S. men’s ice hockey team’s victory over Canada at the Winter Olympics as proof America was “winning again” under his leadership, managing to turn a hockey win into a campaign ad.

Trump also infamously showed up to Game 3 of the NBA Finals in June, caused massive delays, and got booed loudly by the crowd. The Knicks lost that night, snapping a 13-game win streak. Trump skipped Game 4, and the Knicks came back from 29 points down to pull off the biggest comeback in NBA Finals history.

Nor was it the first time Infantino had rolled out the welcome mat for 47. Trump’s most recent financial disclosure showed Infantino gave him 10 tickets, worth $15,000, to last year’s FIFA Club World Cup final, where Trump joined Infantino on the field to present the trophy. Infantino has since said Trump will help present the World Cup trophy itself on July 19. FIFA has also opened office space inside Trump Tower in New York, which is either a savvy business move or a tell. And in December, FIFA created and awarded Trump its inaugural Peace Prize, not long after Trump’s own Nobel campaign fizzled.

As one fan remarked after the embarrassing and forever tainted match with Belgium, “I’m so disillusioned. I almost don’t even care who gets the FIFA Peace Prize next year.”

Welcome to our reality

For 18 months, Americans have watched the Trump regime bend and break the rules while the Supreme Court puts its finger on the scale in his favor. As writer Anne Applebaum observed, Americans have grown so used to their president cheating and breaking rules that many missed why the rest of the world was quietly rooting for Belgium.

Over the past few days, the world finally got a sample of what it’s felt like for us under Trump.

The UEFA Europa League released a statement that could have been written by the Democrats in Congress, or by our long-suffering federal district courts. “Football, like any other sports, relies on rules, which are the basis for fair, honest and transparent competition. Sometimes rules are open to interpretation. In this case not.” The statement continued, with indignant earnestness, “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined.”

Blatter, who himself was forced from office in 2015 amid a corruption scandal and remains suspended from FIFA activities until 2027, sounded like a Georgia election official circa November 2020: “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls,” he declared. “They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies.”

English manager Thomas Tuchel, whose own player had just been sent off, asked the question we all want answered. “Where to draw the line? That’s the question I ask and I have no answer to that — where does it end?” Downing Street, asked whether Trump’s actions were acceptable, sounded a lot like a retiring GOP senator. “Those decisions are a matter for the football world governing body and should stay that way.”

The U.S. head coach gave Sen. Susan Collins of Maine a run for her concern trophy. Mauricio Pochettino insisted Balogun’s reprieve had unfolded through a normal process, but also argued on principle that politicians shouldn’t lobby FIFA on specific matters: “We cannot mix that,” he said.

In the end, it was fitting that Balogun wound up scoring exactly zero goals. After the match was sealed, several Belgian players broke into a YMCA-like Trump dance. The Belgian federation posted a photo of the celebration, captioned “Overturn this.”

In the end, there is a lesson for us all. As noted by Prof. Steven Beschloss, who writes and reports about American politics and history, Belgium’s huge victory margin on Monday night mattered. After all, it made it hard for Trump to lie and say the game was rigged.