U.S. men’s soccer team is the latest victim of Trump’s sports curse
This is an adapted excerpt from the July 7 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
It’s hard to describe just how good the U.S. men’s soccer team was in this year’s World Cup. They played the best they have ever played in the group stage. They won comfortably in their first elimination game. They really looked like world-beaters.
But on Monday in Seattle, they lost 4-1, beaten by a Belgian team that came in fired up. By contrast, the Americans looked distracted. They made some really costly mistakes. And they lost even though President Donald Trump reportedly put his finger on the scale.
If Trump had never gotten involved in the World Cup, there’d be a very different vibe right now.
Over the weekend, Trump called his guy, Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, which runs the World Cup. After that call, the one-game suspension of Folarin Balogun, the star U.S. player who was red-carded for a hard foul last week, was overturned.
That appears to have been big motivation for the Belgian team, which posted photos of its triumph over the U.S. team with the caption “Overturn this.” The Belgian players also mercilessly mocked Trump by mimicking his signature dance to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” — first on the pitch for fans and then again in the locker room.
If Trump had never gotten involved in the World Cup, there would be a very different vibe right now. You could say the U.S. just had a bad game, but instead a lot of people are wondering if the president curses sports teams.
If he has a sort of reverse Midas touch: Everything in his grasp turns to … the opposite of gold.
It may not sound like much of a stretch when one looks at what Trump has done to the Reflecting Pool, the East Wing, the nation’s 250th birthday and pretty much everything he has touched politically. But the crazy thing is how much more pronounced his effect seems to be on sports teams.
It started the month after he returned to office. He went to the Super Bowl and picked the Kansas City Chiefs to win. Then the reigning Super Bowl champion Chiefs got walloped by the Philadelphia Eagles, 40-22. Trump left the game early.
Last year, the president became the first U.S. president to attend the Ryder Cup golf match in New York. Pro-MAGA U.S. fans were churlish to the European team, and when Europe won, the team made a point of taunting the U.S. leader. In a video posted on social media, the players chanted, “Are you watching, are you watching, Donald Trump?”
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Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
