America first, football second

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 b