{"id":125792,"date":"2025-10-16T12:33:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T12:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/125792\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T12:33:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T12:33:13","slug":"football-just-another-front-in-trump-battle-with-us-cities-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/125792\/","title":{"rendered":"Football just another front in Trump battle with US cities \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was not easy to stand out among the plethora of world leaders who formed a subordinate chorus line to Donald Trump<\/a> at Monday\u2019s peace summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, but among the more distinctive faces in the crowd was that of Gianni Infantino<\/a>, the head of Fifa<\/a>. He was the only non-political figure in the audience and later explained he was there at the invitation of president Trump \u2013 a summons he seldom declines.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, Infantino\u2019s name was on the president\u2019s lips again as he mused about the possibility of moving games scheduled for next summer\u2019s World Cup from host cities deemed unfit or unsafe to host. He name checked Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco as host cities who have fallen under scrutiny at Thursday\u2019s unveiling of Operation Summer Heat, in the company of FBI director Kash Patel and attorney general Pam Bondi at the White House. <\/p>\n

Following up on remarks he made on Tuesday, Trump hinted that the administration has the power to move World Cup games from any of the 11 host cities in the US, with other games scheduled for venues in Mexico and Canada. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Why was the president of Fifa Gianni Infantino at the Gaza summit?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cBoston has a bad mayor who at least is a reasonable IQ person,\u201d Trump said of Boston\u2019s mayor, Michelle Wu.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, Boston, she\u2019s got four areas that are … wrong. Somebody said would we think about taking the World Cup away from Boston if they don\u2019t straighten it out. The answer is yes. We have the right to do that with Fifa. So if we think LA is going to be bad \u2013 that applies a little bit to the Olympics too. Fifa is very hot. But if we think there is any reason whether it is Boston or anywhere else that they are not doing their jobs we\u2019re gonna take those World Cup games and move them somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wu had already rejected Trump\u2019s assertion on a Wednesday podcast, pointing out the logistics and contractual details with Boston had already been \u201clocked down\u201d with Fifa, \u201cso that no single person, even if they live in the White House, currently, can do it\u201d. <\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s proposal leaves Infantino in a pickle. The president had earlier asserted that the Fifa head would agree to move venues if prompted by his administration. \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t love to do it, but he\u2019d do it.\u201d Not according to the football body\u2019s vice-president, Victor Montagliani, who, at a London conference at the beginning of the month, directly rejected similar comments Trump had made in relation to Seattle and San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s Fifa\u2019s tournament, Fifa\u2019s jurisdiction, Fifa makes those decisions. With all due respect to current world leaders, football is bigger than them and football will survive their regime and their government and their slogans. That\u2019s the beauty of our game: that it is bigger than any individual and bigger than any country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The respective mayors of the Democratic cities singled out for salvation must wish they could rid themselves of Trump\u2019s attentions as easily. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is just the beginning,\u201d vowed Kash Patel, before listing out the statistics accumulated by the FBI in the seven months since Trump had taken office: 8,700 arrests of violent criminals; 2,200 firearms seized, 421 kilograms of fentanyl seized \u2013 enough to kill 55 million Americans \u2013 and gang arrests up by 200 per cent. <\/p>\n

Todd Blanche, the assistant US attorney general, weighed in with a story of an unnamed Alaskan town whose residents had, over the previous four years, made over 1,000 unheeded calls to 911 to report a hotel that had become a \u201cdrug den\u201d where overdoses and murders occurred. Under Operation Summer Heat, agents had gone in and closed the place down.<\/p>\n

If Washington, DC, was the testing ground for bringing in federal agents, then Chicago is the current battle ground, involving the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker; the city\u2019s mayor, Brandon Johnson; and protesters outraged by the heavy-handed tactics of Ice agents in the city. Now, other cities look set to follow.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we can make San Francisco \u2013 one of our great cities ten years ago, 15 years ago, and now it\u2019s a mess,\u201d Trump said on Thursday.<\/p>\n

\"USUS president Donald Trump, with FBI director Kash Patel (L) and attorney general Pam Bondi (R) at the news media yesterday. Photograph: EPA <\/p>\n

\u201cEvery American deserves to live in a community where they are not afraid of being mugged, robbed, raped, assaulted or shot. I campaigned on crime but I never thought that we would go into every city and take a really safe city that we have all been living with for years and make it safe but now it is like a passion with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is little doubt that every American would agree with the first part of his sentiment. And San Francisco, in particular, has become a global symbol of the fentanyl and homelessness scourge that swept through US cities, exacerbated by a property market hijacked by the influx of tech-salaried professionals in the same period.<\/p>\n

But there is a chasm between the arrest of proven criminals and the sweeping arrests of long-term, peaceful residents of US cities by Ice agents that even prominent Trump booster Joe Rogan described as \u201chorrific\u201d on a recent podcast.<\/p>\n

The administration will not be deterred. Trump reported that Summer Heat started five months ago as a stealth mission in Chicago. It is set to usher in a winter of discontent across many American cities, including several slated by Fifa as fan destinations for next summer\u2019s global football jamboree.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut that really was just preparatory work for what we are going to do with the surge \u2013 we are going to have a surge of strong, good people,\u201d Trump vowed of what is to come.<\/p>\n

\u201cPatriots. And they go in and straighten it all out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was not easy to stand out among the plethora of world leaders who formed a subordinate chorus…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[356,18,34476,74963,19,17,132,6221],"class_list":{"0":"post-125792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-fifa","11":"tag-gianni-infantino","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-trump-presidency"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}