On Friday the United States men’s national soccer team thumped Australia 2-0, thereby advancing to the next stage of the World Cup. Long-suffering American fans, who over the past two decades have endured round-of-16 eliminations (2010, 2014, 2022), a group stage crashout (2006) and even a failure to qualify for the tournament altogether (2018), were ecstatic.
Apparently, so was the Department of Homeland Security. After the victory, DHS posted an artificial intelligence sloplike image of the U.S.’s starting 11. (Notice the artless insertion of Ricardo Pepi, who played for injured star Christian Pulisic.) The image showed our lads standing in front of a soccer net situated behind a border wall — you know, the wall Mexico paid for. The amateurish tableau read: “Built the Wall.” I don’t know what that means. Maybe DHS didn’t, either, because the message has since been deleted.
Team USA offers a full-spectrum representation of the many types of people in this country President Donald Trump and his administration have exhaustively penalized and attacked in one form or another.
Ninety minutes before kickoff, DHS had posted: “OUR SOIL. Defend the Homeland: One Nation, One Homeland, One Team.” On Saturday, it shared a picture of reserve defender Mark McKenzie leading an after-game prayer with the caption “Psalm 150:6,” a verse often invoked by evangelical athletic ministries.
What were the communications professionals at the scandal-plagued agency up to? Maybe DHS is just owning the libs. Soccer fans in the United States tend to skew young, multicultural, female and generally liberal. The squad has dual nationals, immigrants, the child of a Liberian president and even a birthright citizen (Folarin Balogun, who was Man of the Match in the U.S. victories over Paraguay and Australia). In other words, Team USA offers a full-spectrum representation of the many types of people in this country President Donald Trump and his administration have exhaustively penalized and attacked in one form or another.
So perhaps DHS was just talking smack, as DHS is wont to do. What better way to talk that smack than by casting the squad’s victory as validating “America First” ideology, immigration enforcement and Christian nationalism to boot?
Another theory crossed my mind: Could it be that MAGA, or at least a certain rarefied sector of MAGA, is suddenly embracing soccer? In some ways the answer is yes — but certainly not for the reasons we would think. And certainly not for love of the game.
The American right has traditionally reviled soccer. Since the 1990s, when U.S. teams re-emerged in World Cup tournaments, conservatives have tarred the sport as “communist,” “socialist,” “globalist,” “anti-individualist,” “boring,” unmanly, immoral and un-American.
But now President Donald Trump, not necessarily a Johnny-come-lately to soccer, has entered into a symbiotic relation of grift with FIFA’s controversial president, Gianni Infantino. Perhaps it was Infantino’s experience working with host nations Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022) that led him to the masterstroke of making Trump the inaugural recipient of the FIFA Peace Prize. In the words of analyst David Goldblatt, Infantino understood that “a capricious, self-regarding and vengeful leader is best managed through a mixture of showbiz glad-handing and … obsequious flattery.”
Having received his flowers, and a “Trumpified” FIFA, the U.S. president is eager to reciprocate. Back in December, he suggested that American football should find a new name and let soccer, and soccer alone, be known as “football.” Could Rosie O’Donnell, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Kimmel or any other MAGA bogeyman have pronounced a more heretical statement? And let’s recall that Trump offered FIFA the use of the John F. Kennedy Center as its back office during the tournament.
Nor should we forget that Fox has held English-language broadcasting rights in the United States for the World Cup since 2018. Fox analyst and former USMNT standout (and Trump supporter) Alexi Lalas dubbed Trump “the soccer president.” For the most part, Fox’s coverage has been solid and the commentators avoid politics (though viewers are invited to subscribe to Fox Nation for the patriotic price of $17.76 a year).
Those Fox broadcasts are quick to train their cameras on members of the Trump administration. For the June 12 match against Paraguay, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in the stands, looking bored, as if he would rather be invading Venezuela or Cuba. On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in attendance, looking as he always does.
Who is the DHS sending these posts out for?
But the grassroots support that traditionally makes up a major sports following is nowhere to be found in MAGA culture, at least as far as I can tell. Aside from Trump, some members of his Cabinet, his oligarch chums who may like to purchase soccer clubs and profit from the sport’s global footprint, the Fox media empire, and organizations like FIFA that are ready to play ball with authoritarian regimes, nothing indicates to me that soccer is catching fire among MAGA stalwarts. Which prompts the question: Who is the DHS sending these posts out for?
At present, there are conflicting narratives over what the U.S. men’s team represents. The reality is, no matter how much DHS posts patriotic memes about the U.S. men’s team, that team is made up of hyphenated Americans, much like the melting pot of the U.S. population. In this regard it embodies an anti-Trump majority that affirms diversity and openness to the world. That being said, I think it’s important to remember that Team USA is just a bunch of talented footballers whose politics are generally hard to discern and irrelevant to their performance.
Ideally, Americans themselves will get to shape our understanding of what this team ultimately represents. A story in The New York Times chronicled how midsize American cities have enthusiastically supported the national squads they are hosting. “The people of the country,” observed one fan, “have always been very welcoming and gracious with guests.”
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