What would become this summer’s most improbable and short-lived fling began with a double fist-pump and a hip-shimmy.
Christian Pulisic, the U.S. national team’s “Captain America,” had just tucked a tidy one-timer into the corner of the Jamaican net in a Nations League match. It was Nov. 18, 2024, less than two weeks after a vote would return Donald Trump to office, and politics were front of the American mind. Pro football stars and ultimate fighters had begun transforming the president-elect’s herky-jerk hand motions — initially developed in rough sync to the disco beats of “Y.M.C.A.” — into an all-purpose celebration. Pulisic sprinted to the corner flag and tried it himself.
“Well, obviously that’s the Trump dance,” Pulisic explained afterward. “It was just a dance that everyone’s doing. He’s the one who created it. I just thought it was funny.”
The most technically gifted American soccer player of his generation was immediately dubbed the “MAGA Messi,” a left-wing insurgent on the soccer pitch revealing himself as a right-winger off it. Nearly two years out from the U.S. hosting the World Cup during the nation’s 250th birthday, Pulisic’s impromptu choreography represented a “pendulum” moment, two-time World Cup competitor-turned-American-soccer-edgelord Alexi Lalas told me.
A pastime of the immigrant communities and college-educated suburbs that make up Blue America, Lalas argued, was about to finally catch on in the red parts of the country.
In the run-up to the tournament, Trump did everything in his power to make the World Cup his own. He coddled FIFA President Gianni Infantino, a Swiss-Italian attorney, in a whirlwind bromance: Infantino appeared with Trump more than any other world leader last year, and Trump reciprocated by treating the Zurich-based nonprofit more kindly than any other international institution he had ever encountered. It probably did not hurt that FIFA was the only one to invent a peace prize just for him, compensation for being overlooked by the Nobel committee. Lalas hailed Trump as “the Soccer President.”
From Pulisic’s dance to the kickoff of this World Cup, everything seemed to be lining up for Trump to deliver what would be one of his most important and potentially enduring cultural victories: helping to bring the world’s game to a country that had been slower than nearly all its economic peers to accept it. (“America’s Sport of the Future. As it has been since 1972,” soccer outlet Men in Blazers likes to say.)
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.
Still, Trump gave little indication of even being aware of events preoccupying American sports and popular culture. His stream-of-consciousness social media was bare of World Cup observations, and he did not use his powers of curation to direct followers to tune in (as many of his favorite Fox News hosts did, given that matches were being shown elsewhere on Fox).
“President Trump is obviously extremely busy with so many different world affairs, and, sure, soccer and the World Cup is a part of this,” Giuliani told me when I asked earlier this month about Trump’s low profile. “What I could tell you is I’ve met with President Trump four or five times since the start of the tournament. I’ve talked to him another dozen times or so since the start of the tournament. He’s keeping a very close eye on what’s going on, understanding how great a legacy item this is for the United States of America over our 250th birthday.”
Unexpected voices surged into the void left by Trump. Foreigners who had come to the United States began posting online about their travels, and it was largely not about having their social media feeds searched by overzealous border guards or confrontations with ICE agents in stadium parking lots that Democrats had warned for months would sour the visitor experience.
What really broke though were innocent celebrations of America’s simple conveniences and humdrum wonders, off the sightseeing path and far from the coastal metropolises that typically greet first-time visitors: Waffle House breakfasts, Buc-ee’s rest stops, Texas Roadhouse feats, air-conditioning pumped high throughout. Nick Adams, Trump’s special presidential envoy for American tourism, invited the most famous of these new social media stars, German fan “Freddy,” to the White House.
“Thanks to social media, we’re seeing a lot of these; this has been encouraging to see the visitors appreciate what we have,” House Speaker Mike Johnson marveled.
It was a sentiment just about as un-MAGA as you can get — reveling in validation from abroad — but the leading Republican in Congress saw its potential as a midterm campaign message for a political movement increasingly split from within over issues like the Iran war, Epstein Files and regulating artificial intelligence. If Americans couldn’t agree on what makes America great, perhaps those new to it could offer a reminder.
“They’re seeing for themselves the genius of America’s system,” Johnson said. “A system that rewards risk takers and entrepreneurs and job creators and innovators, and people who create jobs for others and expand the economy and opportunity and broaden the pathway out of poverty for more people. That’s what the Republicans stand for.”
A red, white and blue stream of fans lubricated by Michelob Ultra and White Claw rushed toward the Bay Area’s Levi’s Stadium, where the U.S. was due to play its first knockout match, against Bosnia and Herzegovina. I had flown out after following the team’s first-round performance from afar, watching them romp rather effortlessly over Paraguay and Australia, and falling at the last minute to Turkey only after resting top players because the match was meaningless. The World Cup seemed to be the talk of the country; even Thiessen seemed to be watching.
Along the way, American fans seemed to have adopted an instant tradition that I was eager to see and hear for myself. Just after the Australia victory in Seattle, stadium loudspeakers played John Denver’s “Country Roads,” and the overwhelmingly pro-U.S. crowd joined in at full voice, with players and coach seemingly overwhelmed by the surround sound.
The idea of a post-match sing-along wasn’t novel: English fans claimed “Wonderwall,” from the football-mad brothers of Oasis, but the choice of a U.S. anthem struck me. Denver had no known history with the sport, and a paean to mountainous West Virginia — the state that has taken the biggest swing away from Democrats over the course of the 21st century — seemed to purposefully relocate American soccer culture away from the big-city parks and suburban travel-team circuits most associated with its soccer heritage.
In the horde outside Levi’s Stadium, I sought out Max Croes, a former high-ranking official in American Outlaws, the unofficial supporters’ group of U.S. soccer. For nearly two decades, Croes has followed the men’s and women’s teams around the world, often as the group’s capo: The person who leads chants throughout the match.
Croes’ employment history is telling of the American fan base. He is a Democratic campaign operative who has served as deputy campaign manager for Steve Bullock’s presidential run, on Senate races including Jon Tester’s and is an alum of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. He estimated that a majority of the Outlaws members also lean to the left, and nearly spit out his vodka seltzer when I asked whether a political realignment among U.S. soccer’s fan base was underway.
“No political party or politician owns anything related to these teams, nor should they,” said Croes, a native Montanan who has had the number 41 printed onto his U.S. national-team jerseys in honor of his home’s place in the sequence of states joining the union. “But I think that the teams have a collective set of values that are inclusion, diversity, standing up for what’s right, and I think the players have proven that on both teams, the men’s and women’s team, time after time.”
Back inside the stadium, a sea of necks craned upward to catch a four-ship formation of F-35s screaming across the sky. “Cool flyover….RIP eardrums though #MAGA,” posted one fan. “PATRIOTIC MOMENT,” said @TRUMPGIRL_STL. Elsewhere on social media I could see Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick grinning alongside Infantino and Giuliani. Still, there was no Trump.
Forty-five minutes in, striker Folarin Balogun gave the U.S. a lead. Twenty minutes later, as I left the press box to hunt down Lutnick and Giuliani, a roar of rejection — and then an unsettling quiet — broke out over the stadium. I found my way back to the press box to learn what I had missed. Balogun had been sent off with a questionable red card, forcing the U.S. to play the remainder of the match shorthanded and keeping the team’s leading goal-scorer on the bench for a subsequent match should the team advance. Despite the adversity, the U.S. managed to valiantly hold on, even extending their lead while down a player against full-strength Bosnia.
After the final whistle, as fans serenaded the victorious squad with “Country Roads,” I made my way into the belly of the San Francisco Bay Area Stadium to meet with players coming off the field. Unbeknownst to me, Giuliani had already spoken with Trump about the red card, and Lutnick was to begin bringing in lawyers to back an appeal mounted by the U.S. Soccer Foundation by assembling a dossier on the Brazilian referee’s past actions.
I was more interested in asking the players about the changing cultural dynamics swirling around the sport. I asked Chris Richards, a thoughtful young center back who now plays for London club Crystal Palace and has spoken of being the only African American on youth teams in Birmingham, Alabama.
“Soccer was by no means a popular sport in Alabama growing up,” Richards told me. “But through years of evolution, and also this tournament being so close to home, the games played in Atlanta as well, I think it’s shown Alabama and the South in general that this is a really popular game. It’s the world’s game.”
I asked other players if they thought Trump’s role shaping how this World Cup landed on American shores affected the way fans were processing it. Goalkeeper Matt Turner said he didn’t want to talk about politics and wasn’t “going to blue and red this,” but he brought up the song that had just echoed from the stands. “We’re creating our own new sort of things with this ‘Country Roads’ after the game,” Turner said. “The college football scene is mixing with the U.S. scene. And what I’ve loved about it is that it’s not like we’re trying to be like that European culture, we’re not saying, like, ‘Oh, we need to chant like the English chant, or chant like the Germans chant.”
“We’re taking on our own traditions and cultures, and I think that’s the way it should be,” he went on. “We really needed this tournament in order to find our identity alongside our fans.”
Over the coming days, the American soccer conversation would be dominated by events in Washington. That Sunday, FIFA announced it was suspending Balogun’s red-card ban. Over the course of the day, the full extent of the White House’s involvement became clear, starting with a Trump call to Infantino.
“I didn’t know what the hell a red card was,” Trump said. “When I found out, I said ‘You got to be kidding.’”
Balogun was suddenly eligible to play in the U.S.’ next match, against Belgium, with FIFA’s lack of coherent explanation feeding the suspicion that it had made a one-time change to longstanding rules so it could do the bidding of a wealthy and potentially vindictive host. European politicians of all stripes signed letters demanding an investigation, human-rights groups submitted complaints, the Belgium football association filed a quixotic appeal.
After years immersing himself in the pageantry of the World Cup, Trump had managed to influence on-field events without going near a stadium. It all amounted to an almost too-perfect distillation of America First policies: the United States using its power to advance its own interests, even if that meant alienating traditional allies, jeopardizing its moral authority and weakening international organizations whose credibility it had once worked to enforce.
“On behalf of all Americans, thank you for getting rid of that ridiculous red card,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said to Trump at an unrelated White House event. “It was spectacular.”
Balogun, born in New York to Nigerian parents but who grew up in the United Kingdom and now plays in the French league, seemed less blithe about the geopolitical implication of Trump’s intervention. Balogun would later say that he “knew it was going to cause a lot of controversy, and I could almost see within my teammates a bit of nerves, because it’s something that is so unique.”
In the end, Belgium toasted the United States by a 4-1 margin, in a match that was never close and where the Americans were unwatchably poor throughout. Belgium had its celebration at the ready: Their locker room echoed with the sounds of “Y.M.C.A”, the triumphant players doing the same double fist-pump and hip-shimmy that Pulisic had brought to the sport.
I saw MAGA influencers leave the sport they had embraced a month earlier, and more quickly than any seemed ready to reverse their tastes in dress shoes or advanced nanobubbler technology. “The good news is that we no longer have to pretend to care about soccer,” @EndWokeness posted. Or, as Nick Sortor, the MAGA pseudo-journalist, put it: “Here’s some good news, my fellow Americans: We’re less than TWO MONTHS AWAY from the REAL football season.”
On Friday night, Trump was in New York to begin the finals weekend with a FIFA cocktail reception at Trump Tower, where the international governing body has rented office space in what appeared yet one more attempt by Infantino to curry favor with Trump. As the two men nostalgized the crooked path to the World Cup final, Trump rehashed his early doubts about being able to meet Infantino’s expectations for the tournament. “I said ‘Are you crazy? We’re not a soccer country!’” he recalled. “It turned out we were a soccer country, and I think it’s going to remain.”
As the tournament was wrapping up, I checked back in with Young, the senator with whom I had committed the potentially fate-tempting error of watching a Bosnia game at a Belgian-style pub on the first weekend of the tournament. He told me that as the tournament had unspooled, he discerned a change in soccer’s political complexion in the United States that echoed how members of his party imagined a broader demographic realignment turning their way.
“There used to be some jokes about soccer and how it was a blue sport,” Young told me. “I don’t hear those jokes anymore. One of the things that people came to appreciate, as I talked with some back home about the World Cup, is that this is a working man’s game. This is a game for the poor and for the middle class, and it’s certainly not the effeminate game of the elite.”