Cheater in Chief: From FIFA to the Midterms

The United States is hosting the World Cup this summer, the biggest sporting event on earth,
watched by more people than the Olympics. Last Wednesday, one of the U.S. team’s own
forwards, Folarin Balogun, was sent off with a red card in the Round of 32 against Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Under FIFA’s own disciplinary rules, that carries an automatic one-game ban. He was
set to sit out tonight’s round-of-16 match against Belgium in Seattle. That is what a suspension is
for: it is not a suggestion, it is not a starting point for negotiation, it is a line that holds regardless
of whose team is on the wrong side of it.
Then Donald Trump personally called FIFA president Gianni Infantino, according to multiple
reports, less than 48 hours before kickoff. FIFA responded by invoking Article 27 of its own
disciplinary code to suspend Balogun’s ban for a “probationary period of one year” — legal cover
for the plain fact that a suspended player is now set to walk onto the field tonight who was barred
from it three days ago. Trump has already taken credit for it in public, on Truth Social. Belgium’s
federation has called the reversal a breach of fair play. FIFA’s own explanation has satisfied almost
no one; Team USA’s coach acknowledged the ruling was unusual even as he welcomed it. There is
no precedent for a head of state calling the president of FIFA to get a suspended player back on
the field in the middle of a World Cup his country is hosting.
This is not a soccer story. It is the same story Trump has been telling about himself for forty years,
just with a new venue. The pattern is not subtle. Wherever there is a rule, a scoreboard, a vote
count, or a governing body, Trump’s first instinct is not to compete inside it. It is to see whether
the person in charge of enforcing it can be reached. He has been running that play against
elections themselves for years now — his own country’s most of all.
Start at home, because the hypocrisy is the whole point. Trump spent the two months after he lost
the 2020 election insisting, against every count, every recount, and every court up to the Supreme
Court, that he had actually won, and he sent a mob to the Capitol to try to make that lie stick by
force. He has never once retracted the claim. Having failed to overturn an election after the fact,
he has spent his second term trying to make sure he never has to again. In 2025, he personally
ordered Texas to redraw its congressional map mid-decade for five additional Republican seats,
telling Republicans flatly that if they gerrymandered enough other states and did away with mail-
in voting and paper ballots, “the CROOKED game of politics is over” and Republicans would “pick
up 100 more seats.” He has pushed a bill he says would “guarantee the midterms,” floated
eliminating the Senate filibuster to pass it, and told a podcaster that Republicans should “take over
the voting” in at least fifteen jurisdictions outright. This is not a president defending election
integrity. It is a president who lost once, refused to accept it, and has spent the years since
engineering a system where he cannot lose again — the same offer he made Infantino, applied to
the House of Representatives.
He has been running the identical play abroad, in this hemisphere, in plain sight, for the last
several months.

Look at Honduras. Days before the country voted for president in November, and with no history
of American presidents endorsing candidates in other nations’ elections, Trump threw his weight
behind the conservative Nasry Asfura and branded his rival Salvador Nasralla a communist. When
the count stalled for three weeks under disputed circumstances, Trump posted that Honduras was
“trying to change the results” and warned there would be “hell to pay,” making clear separately
that he would cut off U.S. aid if Asfura lost. Days before the vote, he also pardoned former
Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, of Asfura’s own party, who was six years into a 45-
year U.S. sentence for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine. Nasralla, who was leading when the
count froze, has said the intervention cost him an election he was otherwise winning comfortably.
Outgoing president Xiomara Castro called the whole sequence an electoral coup.
Look at Colombia, where Trump publicly endorsed the hard-right Abelardo de la Espriella ahead of
the vote, months after personally telling Gustavo Petro he would stay out of it. De la Espriella built
his fortune as a defense lawyer for drug-trafficking paramilitaries, fraudsters, and corrupt
politicians, and has said openly that he would have been “a real paramilitary” himself had he taken
up arms. Petro called Trump’s endorsement a betrayal of that promise and said the coalition
behind de la Espriella draws on Colombia’s violent paramilitary networks and includes drug
traffickers among its ranks. De la Espriella won anyway, by less than one point, and is now
president-elect.
Look at Argentina, where Trump made a $20 billion currency bailout explicitly conditional on Javier
Milei’s party winning its October midterms, telling reporters in the Oval Office that the United
States would not “waste our time” on Argentina if the vote went the other way.
And look at Brazil, where Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff, the harshest rate he has put on any
country, not over trade but over the criminal prosecution of his ally Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a
coup against Brazil’s own elected government, and sanctioned the Supreme Court justice hearing
the case.
Five fronts, the same hand on the scale every time: money, tariffs, maps, or a president’s public
voice, deployed to produce the outcome Trump wants rather than the one voters or courts were
reaching on their own. He has said the quiet part out loud in most of these — that the aid, the
goodwill, or the redrawn district depends on his side winning. That is not diplomacy, and it is not
governance. It is the same offer he made Infantino: run four more times, at home and abroad,
with a bigger checkbook each time.
What makes the FIFA case useful, oddly, is how small and visible it is. Nobody has to parse a legal
brief or trust a leaked memo. A player got a suspension. A president called. The suspension
vanished. It happened on television, in front of the entire world, during the one month every four
years when even people who ignore soccer completely are watching. Infantino has defended the
coziness as a diplomatic necessity, the price of keeping the host nation’s leader on good terms
with the sport. That is exactly the logic FIFA used to explain away the corruption that the FBI, the
Justice Department, and the IRS spent a decade unwinding. It is the logic of every institution that
has ever decided access to power is worth more than the rule it was created to protect.
None of this requires Trump to be good at the underlying game. He is a notoriously bad golfer who
nonetheless never loses, because the people he plays with know better than to let him. The

sportswriter Rick Reilly spent a book cataloguing it: caddies who move his ball, opponents who
concede him putts they never saw him make, a “Trump Bump” that turns a bad round into a great
one on the scorecard. It is not a golf joke. It is the whole model in miniature. He does not need to
win. He needs the person keeping score, running the tournament, or holding the whistle to decide
it is easier to let him win than to stop him.
And when he is not winning by getting someone else to bend the outcome, he is winning by simply
not paying for it. Trump University promised thousands of people his personal real estate secrets;
he settled the fraud lawsuits that followed for $25 million rather than let a jury hear the case. His
own charitable foundation was found to have functioned as a personal slush fund, down to a
portrait of himself bought with charity money; a court made him pay $2 million in restitution and
forced the foundation to dissolve. Most tellingly, New York’s attorney general spent an eleven-
week trial proving that Trump had inflated the value of his properties for years to secure better
loans and insurance. The judge found the fraud “knowing.” An appeals court later threw out the
nine-figure penalty as excessive, but it left the finding of fraud itself standing.
None of these are opinions. They are settlements he signed, restitution he paid, judgments courts
entered against him, and public threats he made to foreign electorates, all on the record, going
back decades before he ever ran for anything.
The tell in Seattle, in Washington’s own redrawn districts, in Tegucigalpa, in Bogotá, and in Buenos
Aires, is not that Trump tried to bend the outcome. He has always tried; that part is not new. The
tell is how often it works, in public, with no cover story that holds up for even a day. That is what it
looks like when the people running the institutions — a football federation, a state legislature, a
fragile electoral council, a government hungry for aid — decide it is cheaper to let him win than to
tell him no.
And there is a cost to that, even though the people cheering it don’t want to look at. If the United
States goes on to lift the World Cup this month, the win will carry an asterisk that no amount of
celebration can scrub off, because everyone will know a suspended player on its own team was
put back on the field by a phone call from the host nation’s own president. That is not a footnote.
It is the story. A country that lets its president rig business deals, rig his own reelection story, and
rig the tournament it is hosting has not earned anything it wins under those conditions — it has
arranged it. Trump has spent a lifetime mistaking a rigged outcome for a real one. The shame is
not only his. It is what the rest of us agree to live with every time we let it happen again.