Longtime observers of soccer’s struggle to break out of a blue cultural ghetto marveled that one man was about to sell his followers — devotees of the speed and crunch of NASCAR, mixed-martial arts and the NFL — on the communitarian, cosmopolitan, often ponderously low-scoring enterprise Tucker Carlson had called “evil, just the first step toward one world government” and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon dismisses as “the World Economic Forum on a pitch.” Could MAGA really embrace a sport with a reputation at odds with just about everything the movement claims to hold dear?
“They will if the president does,” Sen. Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who co-chairs the Congressional Soccer Caucus and himself a former standout player at the Naval Academy’s NCAA Division I team in Annapolis, told me as we watched Canada’s match against Bosnia and Herzegovina at a Belgian-style pub south of Indianapolis on the tournament’s second day.
Trump drifted from view throughout much of the tournament, but if there is a uniting principle for MAGA beyond its leader, it is the self-reinforcing pleasure of being a winner at someone else’s expense. As the U.S. team romped through the first two rounds, Trump-allied media embraced it, if at times apologetically. “Every American generation is called to sacrifice for their country, and therefore it is our patriotic duty to watch soccer,” MAGA influencer Benny Johnson said on his show. “This is our burden, and we are doing it.”
Today Trump will be back, for the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, where he is expected to help present the winning 18-carat gold Jules Rimet Trophy to either Spain or Argentina. At a FIFA reception at Trump Tower on Friday night, Trump joined Infantino to celebrate this year’s World Cup as a financial, logistical and sporting success. But the political and cultural impact of the Trump-centric tournament will take longer to measure, and the prospects for humanity’s most popular game in the world’s largest consumer market remain in flux. Will MAGA’s summertime fling with soccer ever blossom into an enduring romance?
Trump can sacralize anything, a form of secular miracle that works best with relics of marginal or fading relevance in the broader culture: Lee Greenwood, extra long neck ties in solid power colors, Hulk Hogan, $145 Florsheim Cap Toe Oxfords, the very Village People song to which Pulisic set his dance.
Nothing, though, demonstrated Trump’s ability to elevate mundane cultural artifacts quite like MAGA’s springtime obsession with algae removal. Trump embarked on a $16 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and it didn’t take long for MAGA to mobilize behind the project. By July 4, with the flick of a few thumbs on Truth Social, Trump had rallied his supporters around a rectangular artificial basin fashioned from concrete and a few million gallons of water into a metric of patriotism. The country’s governing political faction suddenly became true believers in “advanced nanobubbler technology.”
When the World Cup began in early June, it appeared that Trump was ready to similarly bless it in a way that would make soccer hard for his followers to ignore, let alone dismiss. The night before the team’s opening match, he spoke to the U.S. squad by speakerphone at their base camp hotel in California. They had “a really good chance of going all the way,” he predicted. The team’s captain, Tim Ream, sat visibly stone-faced in the background.
Ream, a 37-year-old defender who spent much of his career at clubs in England, had previously spoken of the team as “a true representation of what America is” and a “melting pot of people, of personalities, of characters.” It was the type of thing American conservatives suspected that soccer players believed — less about winning than about the utopian society we made along the way.
“It’s very anti-American,” Bannon, the keeper of the MAGA message, told me. “The announcers are anti-American. The whole of the viewership is anti-American. Teams are anti-American, and they go against the basic American exceptionalism.”
During the World Cup in 2010, former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen called soccer a “socialist sport,” one that might “finally catch on in America” in the age of Obama. But, warned Thiessen, “socializing Americans’ taste in sports may be a tougher task than socializing our healthcare system.”
While the first steps toward the ultimately successful World Cup bid happened on Obama’s watch, no great strides were made then toward soccer acceptance. (The U.S. team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, held in Russia, its first absence in more than 30 years.) Trump’s personal arc spoke to soccer’s long and fitful journey circling the margins of American culture. He had joined his high-school team in 1963, an era where spectator opportunities in American soccer were scarce. A decade later he was exposed to the sport’s co star power during the brief 1970s heyday of the New York Cosmos. Among Trump’s children, only the youngest, son Barron, gravitated to the sport.
Rather than the game itself, it seemed to be the potential of playing the host — to 48 nations, millions of visitors and billions of television viewers — that drew Trump in. Over an eight-year period, he developed a genuine camaraderie with Infantino, who was saved a choice seat at last year’s inaugural ceremony inside the Capitol. Soccer became part of the story of Trump’s second term. He hailed legends Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi at the White House, and welcomed Italian squad Juventus to the Oval Office when they were in Washington to play a match nearby. Lalas hailed Trump as “the Soccer President.”
It did not represent a pander from Trump to his base. Andrew Giuliani, who headed the White House’s World Cup task force, told me that “the soccer world generally will lean more left than anything else, especially in the United States of America.”
After his call to the U.S. men’s team on the eve of its first game, Trump stayed far from the tournament. He remained home while delegations featuring members of his Cabinet cheered for the U.S. at its matches, although it didn’t help that U.S. games were concentrated on the West Coast and would have required a full day of travel to attend one.
