{"id":34050,"date":"2026-07-07T14:41:39","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T18:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/how-trump-lost-america-the-world-cup\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T14:41:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T18:41:39","slug":"how-trump-lost-america-the-world-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/design-providers.com\/rise\/how-trump-lost-america-the-world-cup\/","title":{"rendered":"How Trump Lost America the World Cup"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Folarin Balogun has gone home. The U.S. men\u2019s national soccer team is out of the World Cup, beaten 4-1 by Belgium<\/a> in the round of 16. Its star striker will be crossing his fingers that \u201cbeing Baloguned\u201d does not enter the lexicon of the sport. He may not be that lucky. The episode that now bears his name looks likely to become the thing this World Cup is remembered for\u2014the summer the United States hosted the world and showed itself at its worst.<\/p>\n

It did not have to be this way, and for a few weeks it wasn\u2019t. Set aside U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s boorishness\u2014exemplified by his administration\u2019s treatment of the Iranian team\u2014and the tournament had been making the opposite case, for the America that shows up when Washington isn\u2019t looking.<\/p>\n

Folarin Balogun has gone home. The U.S. men\u2019s national soccer team is out of the World Cup, beaten 4-1 by Belgium<\/a> in the round of 16. Its star striker will be crossing his fingers that \u201cbeing Baloguned\u201d does not enter the lexicon of the sport. He may not be that lucky. The episode that now bears his name looks likely to become the thing this World Cup is remembered for\u2014the summer the United States hosted the world and showed itself at its worst.<\/p>\n

It did not have to be this way, and for a few weeks it wasn\u2019t. Set aside U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s boorishness\u2014exemplified by his administration\u2019s treatment of the Iranian team\u2014and the tournament had been making the opposite case, for the America that shows up when Washington isn\u2019t looking.<\/p>\n

When Algeria reached its base camp in\u00a0Lawrence, Kansas<\/a>, hundreds of locals waited past midnight through a thunderstorm to greet the players. The university marching band learned the Algerian anthem, an artist carved the Algerian flag into a hillside, and the crowd turned the University of Kansas Jayhawks\u2019 chant into \u201cRock Chalk, Algeria.\u201d In\u00a0Galloway, New Jersey<\/a>, hundreds of Haitian Americans and local children roared Les Grenadiers onto the field for practice\u2014a team playing its first World Cup in 52 years, from a country on Trump\u2019s own travel-ban list and where violence made the team unable to play at home. In\u00a0Spokane, Washington<\/a>, thousands entered a lottery for a handful of tickets just to watch Mohamed Salah\u2019s Egypt train.<\/p>\n

None of this was arranged by the White House. It was the other America, the one that kept showing up regardless.<\/p>\n

The Balogun affair threatens to bury all of that. The facts are by now familiar. During the round of 32 match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, Balogun earned a red card for treading on an opponent\u2019s ankle and an automatic one-match ban that everyone thought to be beyond appeal. Then, on Sunday, FIFA issued a sudden and highly unusual reversal. As it turns out, Trump had phoned<\/a> Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, several days earlier and asked for what he called a review; FIFA suspended the ban; and Balogun was cleared to face Belgium. Trump\u00a0thanked the governing body<\/a>\u00a0for reversing \u201ca great injustice,\u201d but that\u2019s not how much of the world saw it.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the president, with an assist from the invertebrate Infantino, the United States may become the first host in the tournament\u2019s history to leave a World Cup with its standing in the world lower than when it arrived.<\/p>\n

Trump has contrived to invert the long-established pattern for the way host governments treat a World Cup. It is about as close to a guaranteed return as public life offers: The world shows up, the cameras run, and for a month the country staging the show looks convivial and capable. Even the hosts who used the tournament to paper over uglier business at home\u2014from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1934 through Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018\u2014harvested some of the goodwill they had paid for.<\/p>\n

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