Stopping Trump From Using the LA Olympics to Burnish His Strongman Image
Activists, community leaders, and organizers are already teaming up to prevent LA28 from becoming an echo of the 1936 Nazi Olympics.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass receives the Olympic flag during the closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Saint-Denis on August 11, 2024.
(Keith Birmingham / MediaNews Group / Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
After Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass grabbed the Olympic flag from International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach at the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, she stood alone in the spotlight of the Stade de France, waving the five-ring logo. Moments later, when she and US gymnast Simone Biles handed the flag to Tom Cruise for a Mission Impossible–themed handoff to LA, everything suddenly started to feel real. The City of Angels would be hosting the Olympics in four years.
A few months later, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, a community group based in South Los Angeles, gathered more than 100 Angelenos to take stock and hatch plans to defend their city from the displacement and hyper-policing that invariably come with the Olympics. They were building on the organizing that NOlympicsLA, the central grassroots anti-Games coalition, has been doing since before the bid to host the Olympics was approved way back in 2017 (an unprecedented 11-year runway for an Olympic city).
These gatherings are not merely assessing the state of their organizing or plans for the future. They are wrestling with the new political reality that has arrived with the election of Donald Trump. This is just one of many similar meetings taking place in church basements or on video calls across the country that are attempting to answer the question: How will a Trump White House affect our work? And can the current dire moment also provide new opportunities for struggle and a potential yet to be seen?
In Los Angeles, there is an urgency to these questions. The mass removal of unhoused people and tent cities in future Olympic zones is already happening. As NOlympicsLA organizer Eric Sheehan explained to us, “We expect the Olympics to accelerate the displacement, homelessness, and violent policing Angelenos already deal with on a daily basis.”
And LA28, as boosters have branded it, promises to be a bonanza for the security industry. Back in 2020, President Donald Trump went to Hollywood, where he promised LA28 chairman Casey Wasserman and Sarah Hirshland of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee that he’d supply ample security funding for the Games, likely between $2 billion and $3 billion. In addition, the federal government has already designated the LA28 Olympics a National Special Security Event, or NSSE, a label created under former President Bill Clinton that allows numerous federal intelligence agencies to have even freer rein. This includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Such a scenario would have made former LA police chiefs William Parker or Daryl Gates drool. It’s no coincidence that the recently named chief executive of LA28 is Reynold Hoover, a retired Army officer and brigadier general in Afghanistan who served in the CIA under President George W. Bush. The fact that Hoover is touting his wartime and “homeland security” experiences as background compatible with running a 21st-century sports mega-event says it all.
With Trump’s reelection, it doesn’t take the imagination of a Hollywood showrunner to conjure scenarios by which an NSSE could be weaponized against immigrants, whether undocumented or not. Los Angeles County is home to 951,000 undocumented people, according to calculations from 2019 by the Migration Policy Institute. And that number is surely higher today. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to round up undocumented workers through a door-to-door deportation process that might involve the National Guard and US military, a process he described as a potentially “bloody story.” The Olympics are a perfect alibi for the Trump administration to unleash its anti-immigrant savagery and claim that it’s in service to protecting the sporting spectacle.
In LA, awareness of the perils for undocumented people in the Olympic lead-up is now center stage. Sheehan, the anti-Games organizer in LA, is well aware of the danger this poses, pointing to the fact that LA maintains “one of the largest, most diverse undocumented populations in the US.” But, he told us, “Angelenos are demanding our leaders protect them from the caging and deportation that tends to come with this kind of party.”
Barring unforeseen circumstances, Trump will be in office when the LA Games arrive in July 2028 and he clearly yearns to arrive in California draped in power and glory. No one should be fooled by Trump’s often bizarre envy and hatred directed toward the state of California and its governor, Gavin Newsom (whose ex is, of course, Don Jr.’s partner and former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle). Trump is an excited participant in plans to pull off the 2028 Olympics. In fact, he wants full credit. In August, he posted on Truth Social, “As President-Elect, I worked with the Olympic Organizing Committee of Los Angeles in getting the 2028 Olympics to come to the United States.” Trump then added this mistruth, “There was tremendous competition from other countries.” In reality, the International Olympic Committee simultaneously handed the 2024 Olympics to Paris and the 2028 Games to LA after numerous cities dropped out of the running.
While Trump had little to do with the winning bid, he has a notable sycophant in LA28 chief Casey Wasserman. The grandson of longtime Hollywood kingmaker Lew Wasserman, Casey Wasserman has treated Trump the way all authoritarians long to be treated. In 2020, Wasserman told Trump that hosting a safe and successful Olympics is “not possible without the support you and the federal government have provided us.” Last month, when asked at a press conference how Trump’s reelection could affect the Games, Wasserman responded, “The Olympics aren’t about politics. And they’re not about red and blue, they’re about red, white, and blue. And these are America’s games taking place in Los Angeles. And it sits above politics in just about every way we experience.”
The confluence of Trump and Wasserman’s interests means that Trump will be able to exercise the 2028 Olympics as a platform to burnish his own strongman myth, and in Wasserman, he has a willing partner.
What Wasserman gets out of the relationship is the state muscle to back up his plans in the face of any resistance from community organizations. The military will be in the streets of Los Angeles; one wonders how to resist such an unconstitutional incursion in 2028 if that process has already been normalized. Achieving harm reduction for these Olympics may depend upon the next year and how effectively people in Los Angeles and elsewhere resist Trump’s plan to send the military—”on day one,” Trump has vowed—into our cities to execute his violent promise to deport over 10 million people. If that can be beaten back, one could see the LA Olympics able to avoid echoing the 1936 Berlin Games—and the work to get there has already started.
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