This is an adapted excerpt from the July 7 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

It’s hard to describe just how good the U.S. men’s soccer team was in this year’s World Cup. They played the best they have ever played in the group stage. They won comfortably in their first elimination game. They really looked like world-beaters.

But on Monday in Seattle, they lost 4-1, beaten by a Belgian team that came in fired up. By contrast, the Americans looked distracted. They made some really costly mistakes. And they lost even though President Donald Trump reportedly put his finger on the scale.

Over the weekend, Trump called his guy, Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, which runs the World Cup. After that call, the one-game suspension of Folarin Balogun, the star U.S. player who was red-carded for a hard foul last week, was overturned.

That appears to have been big motivation for the Belgian team, which posted photos of its triumph over the U.S. team with the caption “Overturn this.” The Belgian players also mercilessly mocked Trump by mimicking his signature dance to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” — first on the pitch for fans and then again in the locker room.

If Trump had never gotten involved in the World Cup, there would be a very different vibe right now. You could say the U.S. just had a bad game, but instead a lot of people are wondering if the president curses sports teams.

If he has a sort of reverse Midas touch: Everything in his grasp turns to … the opposite of gold.

It may not sound like much of a stretch when one looks at what Trump has done to the Reflecting Pool, the East Wing, the nation’s 250th birthday and pretty much everything he has touched politically. But the crazy thing is how much more pronounced his effect seems to be on sports teams.

It started the month after he returned to office. He went to the Super Bowl and picked the Kansas City Chiefs to win. Then the reigning Super Bowl champion Chiefs got walloped by the Philadelphia Eagles, 40-22. Trump left the game early.

Last year, the president became the first U.S. president to attend the Ryder Cup golf match in New York. Pro-MAGA U.S. fans were churlish to the European team, and when Europe won, the team made a point of taunting the U.S. leader. In a video posted on social media, the players chanted, “Are you watching, are you watching, Donald Trump?”

He also dropped in when the NFL’s Washington Commanders hosted the Detroit Lions last November. While Washington did lose the game, that might not even be the curse. After winning, Lions wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown celebrated a touchdown with a Trump dance. His team later went on a 3-5 slide, missing the playoffs, which some fans blamed on the Trump curse.

And how about the New York Knicks? Last month they were in the middle of one of the most historic playoff runs ever, with 13 straight wins. That was, until Trump invited himself to Game 3 of the NBA Finals — again, the first sitting president to do that. He got booed, he appeared to fall asleep in the owner’s box, and he just happened to be present for the only Knicks loss in that series.

Even when a team wins, Trump manages to dim its shine simply by trying to share in the glory. When the U.S. men’s hockey team won Olympic gold this winter, the president called the celebrating locker room and congratulated the team by cracking a sexist joke. As always with Trump, the country lost a moment of collective joy, and his boorishness tainted the whole experience.

I’ve said it before: Everything Trump touches is worse off for it — and he wants to put his touch on everything, especially America’s most talented and popular athletes. But rather than having their success rub off on him, he seems to be infecting them with his Trumpiness. 

Is it a curse? I don’t know. But I do know it keeps happening. And it’s not the first (or last) time you’d like to say the guy, “Hands off, buddy.”

Allison Detzel contributed.

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