Trump’s Reverse Midas Touch Even Got the World Cup
Of course fans roundly booed the president at the World Cup final: Damaging the integrity of anything he touches is true to the Trump brand.
Team Spain celebrates winning the 2026 FIFA World Cup on July 19, 2026, in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
(Alex Livesey-Danehouse / Getty Images)At the 2026 World Cup final, the glass encasing the press box was so thick, reported CBS sports journalist Pardeep Cattry, that FIFA’s booming pregame concert was inaudible. Yet, when the match ended, with Spain emerging victorious over Argentina to win it all 1–0 in extra time, you could hear the boos right through the glass: As Donald Trump took to the field to hand out the FIFA World Cup trophy, the decibel level literally rose from 78 to 84. The stadium crowd saw Trump and were audibly repulsed.
This response was a fitting coda to the 2026 World Cup: a tournament engulfed by the stench of Trump’s racism, xenophobia, corruption, and lies. Although Trump himself only attended the World Cup final, the president and his administration stained the tournament in numerous ways, each time so egregiously that it would be unfathomable for another host to do even one of them.
The Trump regime weaponized the World Cup to advance cruelty and brutality from beginning to end—the cruelty, as we’ve long learned, being the point. Ahead of the tournament, the Trump administration barred award-winning Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan from entering the United States, following an 11-hour interrogation in Miami. This was a direct message to right-wing voters who rallied behind his previous racist comments about Somali people being “garbage.”
Then came the Trump administration’s treatment of Iran’s World Cup team. Team Melli, forbidden from staying overnight in the US following their games, was forced to commute from its relocated base in Tijuana to its matches in Los Angeles and Seattle. Of course, Iran’s fans were banned from traveling to the US to attend matches, alongside people from Haiti, Senegal, and Ivory Coast who were blanket denied visas. When Iran was eliminated from the tournament, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gloated, “I might’ve sung a song or two or maybe even danced a happy dance.”
As if to top their boss, his minions at the Department of Homeland Security made two racist posts on X that featured US men’s national team players. In one, DHS featured the slogans, “DEFEND THE HOMELAND” and “ONE NATION. ONE HOMELAND. ONE TEAM.” If that sounds vaguely Nazi-esque, that’s because it is. Not even vaguely. The wording mirrors the “One People, One Realm, One Leader” catchphrase that Nazis deployed during World War II: “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer.”
Then there’s the rescinded red card that shook the world. When Trump called his lickspittle at FIFA, Gianni Infantino, to pressure him to reconsider the red card issued to US forward Folarin Balogun, the rest of the world saw he was blatantly trying to rig the tournament to the advantage of the United States. By elephant-stomping into FIFA’s processes, the president brought his reverse Midas touch to the football world. Trump’s intervention turned a likable US men’s national team into villains.
He also may have damaged the already reviled reign of FIFA’s shamelessly sycophantic leader Gianni Infantino. At a press conference ahead of the final matches of the World Cup, Trump himself described his call to FIFA’s Infantino and the subsequent overturning of the red-card penalty as “probably the most unforgettable moment” of the tournament. All the while, Infantino stood there, silently allowing Trump to bloviate and metaphorically pat him on the head. “Gianni made yet another of his many good decisions,” Trump crowed.
When Trump was roundly booed by fans at the World Cup final, in part it was because of the way he tainted this tournament and the sport they love. Just as Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem have destabilized the very notion of truth in the US, Trump’s intervention and FIFA’s acquiescence destabilized the crucial conception of fairness in soccer.
All the while, Trump used the World Cup—as well as the UFC fight on the White House south lawn three days into the tournament—as a way to toss red meat to his political base. If sportswashing is when political leaders use sports to deflect attention from chronic social problems and human rights woes at home in order to look legitimate and make political and economic gains, the World Cup was a Trumpian sportswash through and through. For one, hosting the tournament deflected attention from the depredations of his Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While we were all engrossed by the World Cup, ICE ramped up its violent deportation machine outside World Cup host cities (although there weredetentions in host cities like Kansas City, too), organizing a surge in the middle of the tournament that averaged a whopping 2,000 arrests a day. The number of people who were tossed into ICE detention facilitiesincreased in June to around 39,000 people after sitting at around 30,000 per month since February. In the last weeks of the tournament, ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston—a World Cup host city—and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.
Given the buffet of depravities that Trump embodies, it’s impossible to know exactly why individuals chose to boo, but choose they did. What united the anger was his very presence, with fans seeing in it a perfect encapsulation of what journalist Pablo Torre calls sports fracking: when a leader drills into a sports spectacle to extract any short-term political benefit, even if it damages the integrity of the sport itself. This “sports fracking” is a practice Trump and other authoritarians revel in. In a way, it’s worse than “sportswashing,” in that it leaves behind a husk of sport. Damaging the integrity of anything he touches is true to the Trump brand.
Before the victorious Spain team lifted its trophy, its captain, Rodri, the Golden Ball winner for the most valuable player in the tournament, proved his valor yet again by shepherding Trump out of way, preventing the sort of notorious Trumpian photo-bomb that tarnished Chelsea’s 2025 FIFA Club World Cup. Nevertheless, Trump loitered at the edge of the festivities until his flunky Gianni Infantino finally managed to coax him off the stage.
If the Spanish men’s national team Instagram account purposefully cropped Trump out of the celebratory photo, the world would understand why.
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