The suspension suspension - details on World Cup Soccer and politics

From Heather Cox Richardson, on FIFA and the suspension suspension thanks to tRump...

" Last week, U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team forward Folarin Balogun, the team’s top scorer, received a red card in a World Cup match against Bosnia-Herzegovina, suspending him for today’s game against Belgium. Then, on Sunday, the Disciplinary Committee of the international soccer governing body FIFA made a surprise announcement, saying that Balogun would be allowed a year-long probation, enabling him to play on Monday.

Folarin Balogun

Almost immediately, Sophia Cai of Politico reported that White House FIFA World Cup Task Force executive director Andrew Giuliani, the son of Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, told President Donald J. Trump about the suspension. As officials from the U.S. Soccer Federation prepared and submitted an appeal to FIFA, Giuliani and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick offered White House lawyers and dug into the professional history of the referee who had made the red card call. Then, on Thursday, Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino, with whom he has been friendly for eight years.

On Sunday, FIFA cleared Balogun to play on Monday. The last, and only, time a red card went unpunished before was in 1962.

The suspension of the suspension has created an international outcry although, as the Associated Press pointed out, this is only the latest step in a pattern in which Infantino appears to have been interfering with the independence of FIFA’s judicial and disciplinary bodies.

The Belgian soccer federation is challenging the ruling. “Regardless of the sporting outcome of the match,” it said, it was “deeply concerned by the way these events have unfolded and will continue, in the hours, days and months ahead, to pursue every available avenue to uphold the fundamental principles of ethics, sporting fairness and the interests of football as a whole.”

The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has called the decision “incomprehensible and unjustifiable.” “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined,” it said. “Football is the most loved sport in the world because it is a beautiful game and is trusted because it is played everywhere with the same laws.”

But a world in which playing fields are level is not the world Trump wants. He wants one in which people in power can ignore the rule of law for their own ends.

Today, at the White House, he told reporters: “So I saw the play. And I’m a person that loves sports and was a good athlete. And I understand sports really well. Really well. And that wasn’t a foul. That wasn’t even an infraction. That was two guys running full speed that happened to crash into each other…. No, these were two great athletes that got tangled up, and this referee, who— is a little bit suspect— if you check his, if you check his past.”

“[Balogun] didn’t do anything wrong, and he’s our best player or one of our best players, a very— vital player, and he gave him a red card. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think it meant much. Then I started hearing that that means he can’t play in the next game, at least in the next game. I said, Boy, that’s a big— You know, if it happened to another player, it would have been unfair, but when they take your best player or just about, they have some great players, but, and they say, you can’t play. That’s very unfair. That’s, you know, it’s one thing to penalize somebody for the game. But how do you penalize them for a game that hasn’t been played yet? is very unfair. You can’t do that. So, yes, I asked for a review by FIFA.

“I spoke to a man who’s highly respected, and, by the way, whose level of respect has gone up tenfold, and he was good before this started. But, you know, he really pushed it in this country.” And then, Trump was back to his usual grievances. “I’m the one that got them to do it. It was not Biden. Biden was asleep. I got him to do it. In fact, it was very sad because I got him to do it. And if the progression was normal, I would have been retired. Now, the Democrats are saying, Man, we should have just let him have his way, he would have. We would have had him gone, but I said, you know, the saddest thing is, I got the Olympics, and I got the World Cup.”

The president of the United States pressuring the president of FIFA to change the rules for his favored player perfectly represents the way Trump thinks about the rule of law in the United States. And the rejection of a level playing field shows in the way Trump and the Republicans have skewed the U.S economy so only their team can win.

Almost exactly a year ago, on July 4, 2025, Trump signed into law what he called the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It passed both the House and the Senate without a single Democratic vote, making it a signature piece of legislation for Trump and his party. As Shannon Pettypiece and Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News reported on July 1, there was a “seismic shift” at the heart of the new law: it extended about $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to corporations and wealthy Americans over ten years while cutting about $1.1 trillion from healthcare and food assistance programs that serve poor and working-class Americans. It also adds about $4.7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.

Public policy scholar Chris Howard noted that the law so dramatically rolls back the modern government constructed during and after the Depression and World War II, from 1933 to 1981, that it amounts to “Robin Hood in reverse.” “It deliberately targets some of the most vulnerable members of society,” he told Pettypiece and Hixenbaugh, “while providing huge windfalls to the richest individuals and to big business.”

And yet in 2026, Trump has taken to saying that those Americans calling for the government to maintain the rule of law to make sure the economic playing field is level, rather than working for corporations and the wealthy, are “communists.”

So he is looking to put a thumb on the scale of the midterm elections as he did in the FIFA match and the economy. Trump is demanding that Congress pass the so-called SAVE America Act, a massive voter suppression bill. Yesterday House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told the Fox News Channel that he will try to get Congress to pass the measure by using the budget reconciliation process. Since such a process cannot be filibustered, Republicans might be able to pass it despite Democratic opposition.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that if the Republicans pass the measure, they won’t lose another election for a hundred years.

“The game tonight’s going to be amazing,” Trump said today about tonight’s match. “We’re going to have a full team and Belgium is going to have a full team. And you know what? If they beat us, then they can be really proud. The other way, if they beat us, we’ll say it was— I say it was rigged just like the election was rigged in 2020.”

Tonight, Belgium defeated the USA 4–1 in the World Cup match played in Seattle.

-------------------

Yep, I added red type to the relevant part. And I left out the part of her history lesson, though Richardson is a great historian. And Richardson's note on the passage of the "One Big Beautiful Bill" last year by the Repuglicans gives total evidence about the fiction represented by the politicized Social Security letter I talked about yesterday.

-------------

Gavin Newsome (on FaceBook) tongue in cheek...