Trump’s FIFA move puts the Olympics on notice
Donald Trump has a habit of treating other people’s rulebooks like an invitation. The latest example came with Folarin Balogun, the U.S. striker whose red card was suddenly on the president’s radar. Trump pressed FIFA president Gianni Infantino to take another look at the call, which is a very odd place for a president to enter a match dispute, but there it was, right in the open.
That move matters because it fits a larger pattern. This administration’s shown a taste for stepping into major sporting events whenever there’s a microphone nearby and a chance to shape the story. It doesn’t matter much whether the issue is ceremonial, political, or tucked inside a referee’s notebook. If Trump wants to talk about it, the topic tends to get dragged into the room.
The awkward part for Olympic officials is not the red card itself. It’s the prospect of every disputed whistle in Los Angeles ending up with a call back to Washington.
Olympic planners are watching that closely. The 2028 Los Angeles Games will be huge, expensive and tied to federal power in ways that can’t be wished away. Security planning, visas, customs, public safety, protocol, communications.
A lot of the machinery runs through agencies that answer to the White House, which means the Games can’t simply shrug and pretend politics lives somewhere else. In digital culture, a red card becomes a meme in minutes. The replay gets clipped, the outrage gets bundled into a thousand hot takes, and suddenly a routine sporting decision looks like a diplomatic incident. That’s the problem Olympic officials are trying to avoid. They need the federal government close enough to help, but not so close that every call, delay, or procedural hiccup turns into a presidential commentary track.
This means Trump’s interest in Balogun also sends a warning about style, not just substance. He doesn’t sit quietly in the background. Publicly, and with a strong sense of ownership, he tends to enter the scene loudly. That can be manageable for a one-off FIFA dispute.
It looks trickier when the event is the Olympics, where the audience’s larger, the symbolism is heavier and the White House has a long list of ways to insert itself without ever touching a stopwatch. So the question facing Olympic leaders is simple enough, even if the answer probably won’t be: can they keep the collaboration functional without turning the Games into a political sideshow? They need help from Washington. They also need to avoid looking as if every medal, protest, or officiating call comes with a presidential opinion attached. FIFA may be living through the rehearsal. Los Angeles is next.
Why LA28 is not FIFA’s playbook
FIFA’s World Cup structure makes life easy for anyone who wants to call the shots. The federation owns the tournament outright, so if a president wants a second look at a red card, a stadium detail, or a hospitality plan, there’s a very short chain of people between the request and the person expected to nod. And that difference gives LA28 more breathing room than FIFA had when the Trump orbit started leaning on it, given the olympics work differently.
From there, at the center of the Los Angeles Games sits LA28, the independent local organizing committee. That’s a much less tidy setup for power and politics, which is probably the point. The International Olympic Committee sets the rules, picks the host and keeps the event moving, but it’s not running daily operations in Southern California. LA28 handles the practical work on the ground. That separation means Olympic officials don’t need to spend their mornings trying to stay in the White House’s good graces just to keep the project alive.
For the Trump administration, that matters. FIFA’s president can be pulled into a direct public relationship with the president because FIFA controls the competition in a top-down way. The IOC, by contrast, is one step removed. It can deal with Washington when it needs to, but it doesn’t have to build its whole strategy around a steady stream of presidential attention. That makes the Olympic setup less flattering, less theatrical, and, frankly, less useful for anyone hoping to turn sport into a photo-op machine.
The more local control a host committee has, the less a global sports body needs to perform daily courtship for Washington.
Kirsty Coventry’s reflected that more measured posture so far. The IOC president hasn’t yet turned up for a public appearance with Trump, which is a small detail that says plenty. She hasn’t slammed the door on political relations. She has also not rushed into the kind of friendly public choreography that FIFA’s often treated like a side sport. In this corner of the Olympic world, restraint seems to be the opening move.
Coventry has also drawn a line between general political good will and the real test. Friendliness in 2026 is one thing. The actual pressure test comes much closer to the Games, when permits, security, travel, and logistics start chewing up everyone’s calendar. A smile in a meeting room years ahead of time can be useful, sure. But it won’t clear a visa problem or keep traffic moving in July 2028. That’s where the rubber meets the road, as the saying goes, even if the road in Los Angeles is usually already jammed.
For Olympics 2028, this structure gives the IOC a few advantages that FIFA never had. LA28 can absorb some of the political heat without making the entire Olympic movement look as if it’s pleading for a seat at the presidential table. It’s somewhere specific to go, if the White House wants to be involved. If it wants to make a splash, it can try. But it can’t as easily turn the IOC itself into the main stage prop.
That doesn’t mean the Games will be immune from politics. Hardly. Federal help still matters, especially for security and travel and any host city that thinks it can ignore Washington’s usually in for a rude awakening. But the structure’s different enough that Olympic officials have more room to breathe, at least for now. The next question’s who, exactly, gets to be the face of that relationship on the ground and that’s where LA28’s own leadership starts to matter a lot more.
Casey Wasserman becomes the go-between
Casey Wasserman’s ended up in the awkward, useful spot where Olympic planning meets Trump-era politics. As chair of LA28, he is the person organizers seem to call when the White House wants a line of communication that feels less like theatre and more like business. That matters because the 2028 Games will need federal cooperation on security, travel, visas, transport, and a hundred smaller headaches that only become interesting once they stop working.
Wasserman’s appearance with Trump in the Oval Office, when the president signed an order creating a White House task force for the 2028 Games, made that role plain. He was there as the practical operator, not the star of the room. For a project as sprawling as LA28, that may be the right instinct. Olympic planning rewards people who can keep the machinery moving. It doesn’t need another personality contest.
The contrast with FIFA politics is hard to miss. Gianni Infantino has spent a lot of time in Trump’s orbit and has tended to communicate in the style of a man who knows the importance of the compliment game. In the president’s good graces, that approach may work when the top priority is staying. It can also turn every interaction into a public performance, with everybody pretending not to notice how hard the flattery’s leaning.
Wasserman, by comparison, looks far more low-drama. His method appears to be: give the day-to-day leaders room to work, keep the channels open and avoid making every meeting into a loyalty test. That sounds almost boring, which is probably the point. The Olympics aren’t short on spectacle. They do not need extra sparkle from the back office.
The cleanest way to handle a political-heavy sports project is often the least glamorous one: get the right people in the room, keep the ego outside, and let the paperwork do the talking.
That attitude seems especially useful for LA28 because the Games sit inside a system that is already layered with formal bodies and rules. The IOC’s own official LA28 record sits alongside a wider network of Olympic institutions, while the anti-doping side of the movement runs through structures like WADA’s international federation partners page. In other words, this is not a project that thrives on improvisation and big smiles alone. It runs on process, and lots of it.
That may be why Wasserman reads as a better fit for LA28 than a more showy political operator. He knows the Games are a giant logistics exercise with a global audience attached. And he also knows that the White House relationship has to stay useful without turning into a personality cult. Trump likes visible loyalty. Olympic organizers, mostly, like usable decisions. Those aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them can get expensive fast.
So far, Wasserman seems to have accepted that his job isn’t to out-charm anyone. It’s to keep the conversation going, keep the calendar moving and keep the people who actually build the Games from getting buried under the photo ops. That may sound modest, but in a Trump Olympics environment, modesty can look a lot like competence.
And if LA28 is going to avoid becoming a stage for another round of sports-politics theatre, it’ll probably depend on exactly that kind of operator: steady, unflashy, and a little allergic to the grand gesture. The real tests are still ahead, but the person carrying the messages already tells you a lot about how the organizers plan to survive them.
The real work is already underway
The conversation between LA28 and the White House Olympic Task Force’s moved well past ceremony and handshakes. The work now reaches into the unglamorous machinery that keeps a huge international event from turning into a mess: access, scheduling, visas and the steady stream of approvals that nobody sees until they go missing.
One of the more unusual items on the planning list is a pro-am golf event at a Trump-owned course in the Los Angeles area before the Games. That sounds almost too on-the-nose for a city that already knows how to stage a spectacle, but it also tells you something plain: organizers are already thinking through how officials, sponsors and guests will move through the lead-up without creating extra friction. The course itself may get the headlines; the actual point is the coordination around it.
In Olympic planning, the dull paperwork is often the part that prevents the loudest problems later.
The visa work is even less glamorous, which usually means it matters more. At the State Department’s request, LA28 helped create a dedicated portal for Olympic athletes and officials who need entry processing before the 2028 Games. That kind of system sounds mundane until you remember how many people descend on the host country when the Olympic machine gets going. A regular queue can become a bottleneck fast. A separate portal gives organizers a cleaner way to sort applications before the pressure builds.
That portal has already been used. A small group of LA28 support staff used it to enter the United States, which gave the organizers an early chance to see how the system works in practice. It’s a modest test, but those are the kinds of tests that expose the glitches before they turn into embarrassment on a much larger stage. Nobody wants the first major Olympic scheduling drama to be caused by a login error.
LA28’s discussions with the White House task force have also gone beyond ceremonial planning. The group has been working through operational issues with federal officials, which makes sense when you’re preparing an event that’ll depend on security, entry clearances, transport, and interagency cooperation. The federal government doesn’t need to run the Games to make life easier or harder for them, and everyone involved seems to know that.
Along the same lines, the political personalities matter too. Kirsty Coventry can keep the International Olympic Committee focused on calm, measured relations and Casey Wasserman can manage the local side in his own low-drama way, but the practical work is still sitting in inboxes and shared documents. Someone has to build the systems, chase the approvals and make sure the machinery doesn’t stall when the real traffic arrives. That’s where the White House task force stops being a photo-op and starts looking like an operating requirement.
For now, that arrangement seems to suit everyone. The White House gets a role. LA28 gets help. And the Olympics, for the moment, get a few less headaches before the opening ceremony even exists on paper.
What comes next for the Olympic White House test
Trump’s made his position plain enough to survive a karaoke room: in his telling, both the Olympics and the World Cup are trophies he helped bring back to the United States. He has talked about the 2028 Los Angeles Games as something he secured during his first term, right alongside FIFA’s marquee tournament, and that framing matters because it turns a planning exercise into a credit claim. Once a president starts treating a sports event like part of his own legacy package, everyone else has to decide how much of that story to entertain.
The tricky part is keeping the federal help and losing the presidential lapel pin.
That tension’s likely to grow, not fade. LA28 will need Washington for plenty of dull but unavoidable tasks: security coordination, visa processing, customs issues, airspace planning, and the kind of interagency choreography that nobody notices until it breaks. The IOC needs the host city to stay on schedule. LA28 needs federal machinery to show up and function. Trump, meanwhile, is perfectly capable of turning a logistical update into a claim of authorship before the coffee gets cold.
That leaves Olympic leaders in a familiar but awkward position. They need a working relationship with the White House, and sports diplomacy almost always requires some patience, some flattery and a decent poker face. Still, there’s a difference between being civil and becoming part of a photo-op circuit. FIFA has already shown what that can look like when a world governing body decides that public praise is the price of access. The Olympics may not have to copy that approach, but they won’t get to ignore the pressure either.
As the Games draw closer, the relationship among LA28, the IOC, and Washington will probably get tighter by necessity. More meetings. And more sign-offs. More opportunities for everyone to claim they’re just being pragmatic while quietly angling for the better headline. The real test’s whether Olympic officials can keep the cooperation practical and boring, which, in this case, sounds like a compliment. If they pull it off, the Games can still feel like a major international event rather than a very expensive presidential selfie.
