Trump Strong-Arms FIFA to Overturn a Red Card Suspension Against an American Player in the World Cup

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a bad call fixed. By most accounts, the red card handed to U.S. striker Folarin Balogun during a challenge in the team’s win over Bosnia and Herzegovina—a red card means expulsion from the game and a suspension for the next one—was harsh. And fans, pundits, and even elected officials venting about it is perfectly fine and totally commonplace. That’s not what happened here. What happened is that Trump treated FIFA the way he treats any institution that’s supposed to operate independently of him: as something to be leaned on rather than persuaded, using the machinery of his office to get a result he wanted.

After the red card, Trump called FIFA President Gianni Infantino directly. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, seated next to Infantino at the match, started working the phones almost immediately, and what reportedly followed were days of coordinated strategizing between the White House’s FIFA task force and U.S. Soccer’s legal team over how to build a case for reversal. The U.S. government reportedly supplied “additional evidence” that FIFA’s disciplinary committee then cited in lifting the suspension ahead of tonight’s Round of 16 match against Belgium—the first time since 1962 that a World Cup red card hasn’t resulted in a suspension.

Remember: when Trump has power, he thinks he can do anything with it. As Berny Belvedere and León Krauze discussed on Zooming In before the tournament even began, that instinct has shadowed this World Cup from the start—visa policy, game locations, and, in April, a proposal to hand Italy a spot in the tournament it hadn’t earned. Italy failed to qualify, but Trump’s special envoy, Paolo Zampolli, floated giving them a berth anyway, pitching the idea to Trump and Infantino as a fix for Iran’s participation in a U.S.-hosted tournament in the middle of a war; reporting at the time tied it to patching up Trump’s own rift with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

CNBC reports:

President Donald Trump on Monday defended making a phone call to FIFA President Gianni Infantino, which led to the soccer association overturning a one-game World Cup suspension of U.S. Men’s National Team striker Folarin Balogun.

“I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul,” Trump said, referring to a referee issuing Balogun a red card in his team’s victory last week over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I didn’t know what the hell a red card was,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office of the White House.

Two other lines from that same appearance round out the picture. Trump called the referee who awarded the red card “a little bit suspect if you check his past”—the same reflex he’s turned on judges who rule against him, baselessly questioning their motives or backgrounds rather than the substance of a ruling. And on what would have happened had the suspension stood, he said the game “would have a big mark on it, if we lost or if we won”—a framing that treats any result reached without his intervention as inherently suspect, regardless of the outcome.

FIFA could have said no. It didn’t. But that’s a story about FIFA’s spine, not the executive’s use of power, and it’s the latter that’s the point here.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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