Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but Donald Trump was loudly booed in his hometown this week when he appeared at the NBA Finals in New York’s Madison Square Garden. He then decided against travelling to Los Angeles for the USA’s first game of the World Cup due to a “tight schedule”, according to the executive director of the White House, Andrew Giuliani.
One can imagine how the LA crowd would have reacted to images of Trump on the monstrous screen that hangs down over the SoFi Stadium. California is Democratic heartland and the noise would have been so undeniably, unavoidably hostile that even Trump would have had trouble denying the truth. The White House will instead send a party from Washington led by secretary of state Mark Rubio.
It is unusual for Trump, who doesn’t usually let a tight schedule get in the way of sports events. He has appeared at the Super Bowl, UFC fights, the Ryder Cup, the Fifa Club World Cup final and the men’s US Open final. Reactions have been mixed: he was booed at a World Series baseball game in 2019 and hit with chants of “Lock him up!”; there was a far warmer reception at the Ryder Cup, where the crowd of American golf fans looked not unlike an NRA convention.
It is also unusual given state leaders in the past have appeared at their country’s first match of the tournament, including Sheikh Tamim at Qatar 2022 and Vladimir Putin at Russia 2018. The host nation’s figurehead is almost always at their country’s first game in much the same way they would always attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.
The next Olympics, incidentally, will be in this same city, in this same stadium, in two years’ time. LA ‘28 will be an awkward Games politically, with one source recently telling The Independent that IOC president Kirsty Coventry is quietly dreading the political dance between the Democrat-led host city of LA and a Trump-run government in what will be his final year in office. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, may well be running for the presidency.
Trump will be at one sporting event this weekend, in a far safer space, when the White House hosts a fight night titled UFC Freedom on Saturday evening. The event is being staged to celebrate Trump’s 80th birthday and the USA’s 250th anniversary, in that order.
Trump might have been expected to plaster his face across this World Cup, to use it as a tool for soft power, for some chest-beating on the global stage. But his administration’s aggressive approach to border control suggests if anything he has turned inwards, using the tournament to send a message to his ever-receding support base. While Canada have been turning away Thomas Partey, who is charged with alleged rape, the US have turned away Africa’s referee of the year, seemingly for little more than being Somali.
US foreign policy has swung back and forth between isolationism and interventionism for a century, and this is a strange moment for the country to host the world’s greatest cultural event, a joyous festival of sport, when Trump has gone out into the world and embarked on half a dozen conflicts in his second term.
Relations with fellow co-hosts Canada and Mexico have rarely been worse. The US is at war with one of their guest nations. The entire tournament’s ethos – Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s much parroted “football unites the world” mantra – could not be at greater odds with America in 2026.
At home, polls suggest his popularity is at an all-time low. So perhaps Trump simply didn’t fancy another blow to his pride. Above all with Trump, beyond money, sex or power, it comes back to ego. It is why he craves royal invitations and peace prizes from sycophantic Fifa presidents. And perhaps there is little more bruising for the president of a World Cup host than to be unwelcome at his own party.
