I fear for the 2026 World Cup under Trump | Will Bunch Newsletter

I’m back in black, with apologies for skipping last week’s newsletter — which collided with my father’s funeral service — and a renewed determination to chronicle all the major outrages of a strongman presidency that runs counter to all of the moral values that my dad instilled in me, as well as my undying faith that America can someday be the great nation that our founders promised here in Philadelphia.

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When U.S. Soccer teamed up with its Canadian and Mexican counterparts seven years ago in a first-of-its-kind joint effort to host soccer’s World Cup finals in 2026, their bid contained a remarkable guarantee to the sport’s governing body, FIFA.

Sure, America’s then-president Donald Trump was a global lightning rod for controversy. But they claimed the U.S. Constitution assured he could not be in the White House when the games finally began.

“The political climate in the United States remains particularly polarized following a contentious election in 2016,” the bid book acknowledged. “President Donald J. Trump’s job approval currently registers at low levels in some surveys, but he enjoys significant support from his base. Due to term limits, he will not be eligible to be President in 2026… Though the image of the United States abroad may have suffered in some places, the United States is still viewed in positive terms by the majority of the world.”

Apparently no one at U.S. Soccer had ever heard of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States.

Now, the non-consecutive second coming of Trump — so utterly unimaginable back in 2018 — is already casting a shadow over what has been anticipated for years as the glorious return of the world’s most-watched sporting event to America.

As many recall, the United States successfully hosted the World Cup in 1994, so you may be wondering what could possibly go wrong when teams from 45 countries come to North America next June...

Well.

Reports of airport hassles and inexplicable detentions of tourists — even from our friendliest allies like the UK, Canada and Germany — are already spooking the great masses of soccer fanatics who’d once planned to travel next summer. One can’t help but wonder whether some of the world’s top players or possibly entire nations would consider staying home as the Trump regime’s list of human-rights violations swells. And that’s assuming we’re not at war with Denmark or Panama or even our co-hosts-turned-frenemies, Canada or Mexico.

As a soccer fanatic myself (a passion that was sparked, in fact, by watching that ‘94 World Cup as a largely housebound new dad), I’m terrified that an event I’ve so eagerly anticipated most of my adult life — with bucket-list fantasies of seeing my cursed U.S. men’s team play out on the West Coast, and taking in another match or two here in Philly — is just one more American Dream getting trashed by Trump.

My anxiety peaked last week when I read the shocking story of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a 36-year-old Venezuelan youth soccer coach and former player, who last year fled his native county’s repressive Maduro regime after he was arrested in an anti-government protest, and came to the United States seeking political asylum.

Instead, according to his attorney, officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) falsely pegged Barrios as a potential member of the gang called Tren de Aragua — now a designated “terrorist group” — solely on the basis of an innocent hand gesture on social media and his tattoo, which is the emblem not of a gang but of Spain’s famed Real Madrid soccer club. Earlier this month, the former athlete was one of 238 Venezuelan refugees flown by ICE to El Salvador, then sent to that country’s most notorious prison without any due process.

Barrios' plight is just one of the many horror stories on the immigration and customs front since Trump took office and unleashed the worst goonery from ICE and the Border Patrol. But the soccer angle in this case seemed to play on the wider fears that any kind of leisure travel to the United States just isn’t worth the potential risks. In recent days, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland and Canada have issued travel advisories warning about the current American situation — prompted, no doubt, by a spate of nightmare tales about the mistreatment of tourists from their own countries and elsewhere.

Earlier this month, The Athletic quoted Travis Murphy, a former State Department official and NBA lobbyist, as saying that “America faces a philosophical question as to whether it wants the World Cup to be an event that is ‘open and inclusive’ to the world.”

That feels unlikely, but what’s also unlikely is that FIFA — which in the 21st century has established a tradition that only oil-rich dictatorships (Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022, and the Saudis in 2034, not to mention us) possess the wealth and iron fist to host soccer’s extravaganza — will do anything about this. The current FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, has grown so close to Trump that he even attended his January inauguration in the Capitol Rotunda, so don’t expect any last-minute sanctions.

“FIFA’s most strident critics are already talking of how the body [is] now facilitating ‘the [MAGA] World Cup,’” the UK Independent’s soccer writer Miguel Delaney wrote recently, adding, “One senior source is of the opinion that Trump will use it to promote his political ideology and that source even labeled it as sportswashing.”

If that happens, the din from humanitarian groups about awarding 75% of the North American matches to an increasingly authoritarian U.S., and the calls for protests and even boycotts, will get louder. Earlier this month, the acclaimed Hungarian-born pianist and composer András Schiff canceled his planned 2025-26 American tour, blaming “the recent and unprecedented political changes in the United States.” It’s hard not to believe that some of the best athletes in arguably the most diverse sport on Planet Earth won’t reach the same conclusion.

And these fears are only based on the current situation, some 15 months ahead of the tournament. Remember how the USSR’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan ruined not one but two cycles of the Summer Olympics? Can the World Cup seriously go forward if Trump is ordering attacks on Greenland, or the Panama Canal, not to mention his threats to make Canada “the 51st state” and drop bombs on Mexican soil to go after drug cartels? This on top of our country’s broken promises on climate change, and potential nightmares around homeless sweeps in host cities or whatever else Kristi Noem’s Homeland Security has in store.

The most likely scenario is an “America First” World Cup that drives an even bigger wedge between us and the rest of the globe. I can’t take much solace in knowing that the lack of fans will make it easier for me to check off the top of my bucket list by scoring tickets to see Christian Pulisic and his American mates take the pitch in Seattle on June 19, 2026. The World Cup probably won’t be much fun when most of the world hates us.

Question: Whose silence is more deafening, [Sen. Dave] McCormick or [Sen. John] Fetterman (you pick the topic)? — ‪@r5-to-philly.bsky.social‬ via Bluesky

Answer: That’s a great question, because we tend to give a free pass to Republicans like McCormick who — in keeping with traditions established by GOP predecessors like former Sen. Pat Toomey — are almost expected to ignore their Pennsylvanian constituents. Fetterman, on the other hand, is drawing a massive amount of Democratic anger right now for his tepid resistance and occasional acquiescence to Trump, which is not what he promised voters, at all. During the recent break, Fetterman traveled to Israel, where right now he’s probably more popular than in Philadelphia. To put a cherry on top, Fetterman is going to appear in Pittsburgh with McCormick, not for a town hall but an event to promote the book that the GOP’s junior senator co-authored with his former Trump 45 administration wife. People are planning to protest. They should.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I received a surprisingly massive response to my two-weeks-ago question about the use of boycotts to punish firms that either actively support the Trump regime or capitulate to its demands. The list featured Tesla (of course), Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos' Washington Post, Home Depot, and less obvious choices like locally-based Trump-supporting Yuengling (which I haven’t touched since 2016). “Yes, I believe that withholding funds from Amazon and retailers like Target and Walmart are important ways to fight back,” Angela Murray wrote. But a few remain dubious these tactics can work. Opined Robert G. Wick: “While one could take pleasure in the fact that Tesla is losing billions, when you’re as rich as Elon Musk, losing even $10 billion is like one of us losing a dollar bill.”

📮 This week’s question: Higher education is under attack from the Trump regime, leaving university administrators with an impossible choice. Do they risk losing academic freedom by complying with the White House’s escalating demands, or fight back and endanger their substantial federal dollars? What do you think they should do? Please email me your answer and put the exact words “Trump colleges” in the subject line.

It’s a sad commentary on American militarism that when U.S. air and sea forces conducted a massive military strike against Houthi rebels based in Yemen in the early morning hours on March 15, which killed 53 people, the story barely made a blip in U.S. media. Although it was the largest actual military action by the tough-talking Trump regime, a quarter-century of U.S. actions from Afghanistan to Africa have, I suspect, numbed many Americans to what goes on over on that side of the globe.

On Monday night, however, the Yemen-strike story came back in a huge way as the public learned about a Signal-app chat group used by the highest-ranking Trump regime officials to plan and discuss the attack. The reason the world knows this? Those officials — including National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance — somehow mistakenly, and gobsmackingly, added the editor of The Atlantic, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, to their chat group. Goldberg’s deftly handled, all-time scoop on the security-breach fiasco dropped Monday afternoon.

I have to say that the actual content of the messages that a journalist like Goldberg were not supposed to see wasn’t as shocking as one might expect. The discussion did, however, raise some serious and legitimate questions about how personally involved is Trump in major foreign policy decisions. The regime’s top officials did display a level of contempt for our shaky alliance with Europe that is hardly a secret at this point. I was somewhat appalled that Waltz responded to news of the strike, which reportedly killed two children among the victims, with a string of emojis that included a fist, an American flag, and a raging fire. (So mature, right?) But make no mistake, the biggest scandal of the Yemen group channel is simply the fact that it existed, on a not-fully secure commercial app like Signal — a screwup whose magnitude was shown by Goldberg’s accidental inclusion.

I don’t normally get as worked up as some people do about security breaches, because the journalist in me believes the U.S. government keeps far too many secrets, not too few. But this one is different, because of the legitimate risks to our rank-and-file troops and intel assets posed by this careless conversation and the chance this information could fall into the wrong hands. Politically, the gross incompetence here could, and should, resonate with some voters who’ve been stubbornly oblivious to Trump’s assaults on democracy during his first two-plus months in the Oval Office.

If this had happened under Joe Biden or some other Democratic president, we know the Republicans on Capitol Hill would be howling loudly, and 24 hours a day, on the Senate floor or Fox News and everywhere else, for the heads of every person involved in this disaster. In this case, I think it’s a moment for top Democrats — who are rightfully under fire for their milquetoast response to Trump so far — to finally act like their aggressive GOP counterparts. The minority leaders — Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries — and others need to go before the cameras today and demand that Waltz, Hegseth, and perhaps other key officials resign. Who knows? Maybe the massive stupidity of the Yemen group chat is the tiny air vent that can cause their Death Star to finally blow up.

I’ve tried to be pretty consistent throughout my years as an opinion journalist in fighting for mostly progressive values while giving no quarter to hypocrisy by Democratic Party officials — something there is way too much of. When Hillary Clinton came to the Daily News newsroom seeking our endorsement in the 2008 Pennsylvania primary against Barack Obama, I was aggressive in pursuing the open question of the moment: Whether she’d lied in trying to claim her foreign policy experience included coming under “sniper fire” in a 1996 trip to Bosnia. My questioning provoked her admission that she’d made “a misstatement.” Read the whole thing: “Exclusive: Clinton acknowledges a ‘misstatement’ on Bosnia sniper fire."

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