AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Trump regime has sucked a lot of joy out of the World Cup

When FIFA, soccer’s governing body, awarded the 2026 World Cup to Canada, Mexico and the U.S. in 2018, their joint bid to co-host represented three countries working together in perfect harmony. Thanks to one deranged, deeply unstable person, that North American unity is long gone.

Leave it to the panoramically ignorant and colossally evil president of the United States to singlehandedly take a ton of happiness out of the World Cup of soccer, the biggest sporting event on earth.

First there was the tale of Somalian referee Omar Artan. Despite having a proper U.S. visa and a diplomatic passport, Artan, Africa’s 2025 referee of the year, was questioned for 11 hours by U.S. customs officials and shamefully denied entry into the United States for the World Cup.

Then the Trump regime forbade the Iranian team to practice in the U.S. This meant Iran has to fly back and forth to Mexico to train. No other team in the tournament has that kind of burdensome travel schedule, enforced solely out of spite and hate.

Making things worse, the U.S. broke a long-standing World Cup rule that all teams get an allotment of 8% of tickets to each game for their nation’s soccer fans to purchase. Trump, ever the compassionate Christian, denied Iran any tickets to any games. This desecration of international sporting ethics is nothing short of pure, racist evil.

The president is deploying ICE agents to many of the U.S. cities hosting World Cup matches. Coming after the nightmare in Minneapolis, where ICE goons murdered two American citizens, there is genuine fear about what the ICE thugs will do at World Cup games. People of colour are justifiably terrified what might happen to them if they attend a game in person, which explains why over 180,000 tickets were still unsold at the beginning of the tournament.

On the geo-political front, the convicted criminal in the White House has once again heightened tensions with Mexico and Canada – his World Cup co-hosts – by threatening to throw away the current free trade agreement (CUSMA) and stop negotiations on a new one. Trump gets a pathological kick out of tormenting his neighbours and allies.

Then there’s America’s new doctrine about exercising complete control over our hemisphere – with their National Security Policy from December 2025. It states that the U.S. wants full and unfettered access to all of Canada’s and Mexico’s natural resources. This isn’t an incoherent, ignorant thought from a president whose cognitive decline worsens by the day; it’s official U.S. foreign policy.

Just recently, the felon in the Oval Office once again suggested Canada should become the 51st American state. He has also threatened to use the U.S. military to bomb Mexican drug cartels. So much for continental harmony.

Then there’s FIFA, laughably giving the U.S. president a meaningless peace prize, after the U.S. bombed seven countries in 2025. Less than a month after receiving his bogus peace prize, the war-loving U.S. president ordered the violent kidnapping of the leader of Venezuela. For FIFA to curry favour with an American president that could be guilty of war crimes after bombing a school in Iran that killed over 170 young girls on the first day of Trump’s vanity war of choice, only proves that corruption begets more corruption.

The World Cup of soccer is such an important event that more countries on earth compete for its trophy than are registered with the United Nations. Currently 211 countries vie for the World Cup, while 206 countries are part of the U.N. When the final match is played, it is estimated that one third of the planet’s population – several billion people – will be watching.

Soccer is called “the beautiful game” but the Trump regime’s hateful and petty actions have taken away joy and added a lot of tension to the World Cup for players, fans, officials and between the three host nations.

The World Cup represents everything the president cannot stand: diversity, equality, inclusion. Maybe that’s why he has tried so hard to take as much joy out of this global celebration as he possibly can.