The United States lost to Belgium 4-1 on Monday night, and its World Cup is over. But the game is the least of what America lost. Over the span of a single week (with one phone call, one reversed suspension and one gloating social media post), Donald Trump corrupted international sport for a generation.
After America’s star striker was sent off with a red card in its match against Bosnia and Herzegovina – which carries an automatic one-match ban – Trump made a personal phone call to Fifa President Gianni Infantino. Within hours, a Fifa panel announced that Folarin Balogun’s ban would be suspended. America was thrashed anyway.
Trump claims he merely asked for a review. Of course, granting him the benefit of the doubt on sporting integrity requires ignoring a lifetime of evidence. This is a man famous among golf partners for shaving strokes, claiming championships at tournaments he never entered, and celebrating holes-in-one that witnesses swear never happened.
But let me be more generous to the White House than it deserves. Suppose the US President’s call was casual, and Fifa’s panel would have reached the same result without presidential input. It still doesn’t matter. Confidence in sport does not run on the facts of any single ruling. Mostly it runs on the belief that outcomes are not for sale and, in turn, that referees do not answer to gamblers or gangsters or corrupted presidents.
The moment a head of state phones the head of world football trying to push for special treatment for his own team’s star player, and a favourable ruling follows within hours, the belief in impartiality dies instantly. For years and years to come, every close call and every “convenient” review involving an American team will now carry the same questions.
Trump, pictured with Fifa President Gianni Infantino and referee Alireza Faghani, is known for claiming championships at tournaments he never entered, and celebrating holes-in-one that witnesses swear never happened (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)Soon after Fifa’s ruling, the President was crowing on Truth Social about it “reversing a great injustice”. Belgium’s football association was astonished. They said Fifa had “crossed a red line” and that “the integrity of the game is at stake”. Norway’s coach, whose team advanced by playing under the rules as written, called it a decision “that will hurt the World Cup”. Mark Pieth, the anti-corruption expert Fifa once hired to reform itself, named it plainly: “a blatant abuse of power”.
America has paid full price for our president’s meddling in the game. Namely, decades of hard-fought credibility. And beyond football, it is vital to acknowledge the corrupt context in which this happened. This is the same Fifa whose executives were marched out of a Zurich hotel in 2015 as part of an American racketeering case, resulting in more than 50 defendants, dozens of guilty pleas, and the most consequential anti-corruption prosecution in the history of sport. It’s also the same Fifa that watched last December as its leader, Infantino, hung an invented “Peace Prize” around Trump’s neck at the World Cup draw, then watched days later as Trump’s Justice Department moved to abandon a hard-won Fifa bribery conviction because such cases no longer fit the administration’s “priorities.” Fifa even opened an office in Trump Tower.
Can you really read that and not be at least very sceptical about what played out this week?
Every official in that disciplinary room at Fifa understood the arithmetic. America’s prosecutors can end your career. But also, America’s president can make your legal problems disappear. Quite the “carrot and stick” — and Trump didn’t need to lay it out there. His chummy relationship with Fifa execs shows that they picked up on the calculus quickly.
‘America lost big last night. And because of Trump, it will carry that black mark for years to come’ (Photo: Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)None of this surprised me, because I saw how Trump dealt with “referees” when I worked for him at the Department of Homeland Security, especially the referees of our democracy, the judges. In his first term, the pattern was too obvious to ignore. Trump would intimidate them publicly on social media, work the higher-ups privately, and when the rulings still went against him, attack the legitimacy of the refs’ robes.
I vividly remember one such Oval Office meeting. The sky was dark outside as a half dozen of us sat on the couches in front of the Resolute desk, listening to Trump complain that the courts were making him look weak politically. They were striking down his orders left and right, and no one was giving him good ideas to fix the problem.
“We need to get rid of the judges,” the President declared, pounding a fist on the desk. He was particularly angry at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for reversing his decisions. “They are ruining this.”
“Yes, sir, a country without judges would help,” Stephen Miller, then a senior adviser, piped up, without a hint of sarcasm. Trump didn’t seem to notice. He fumed that the only cases he’d won as president were “on Stormy Daniels and the weak-ass travel ban,” referencing the adult dancer he allegedly paid off and his aborted “Muslim Ban”.
Despite knowing that he lacked the votes in Congress to impeach federal judges, Trump demanded that staff draft a bill to break up and rearrange the courts, especially in left-leaning regions. When the umpires ruled against him, the President of the United States proposed getting rid of them.
A man who thinks that way about federal judges was never going to think differently about a Fifa disciplinary panel. Fifa simply proved easier to move than the American judiciary. This time, the referees folded.
There are long-term winners and losers from Trump’s phone call. The winners are the people who have always treated sport as a market for influence. Now it seems that the fixers and the federation bosses with Swiss bank accounts are vindicated in their view that sport is really just a place to launder money and reputations, to sanewash corruption. They’ve long argued that everyone does it, and that Western talk of fair play was a pose. Well, an American president just proved their case free of charge.
The losers are everyone the games were for. This week, it was the Belgians who prepared for an opponent who was restored by political muscle. It was Balogun, a gifted striker whose achievements now carry an asterisk he never asked for. And it was his fellow US players who fought last night and lost honestly.
It was also the millions of Americans who’ve made the case that we win “on the merits”. For decades, we boycotted, prosecuted and lectured the autocracies that bent sport to the glory of their regimes in search of riches. This week, as a host nation, we joined their ranks.
Sport’s entire value is the belief that the contest is honest. Autocracies have always been willing to burn that belief for a moment’s glory, but democracies were supposed to know better. America lost big last night. And because of Donald Trump, it will carry that black mark for years to come.
Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader
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