It was not easy to stand out among the plethora of world leaders who formed a subordinate chorus line to Donald Trump at Monday’s peace summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, but among the more distinctive faces in the crowd was that of Gianni Infantino, the head of Fifa. He was the only non-political figure in the audience and later explained he was there at the invitation of president Trump – a summons he seldom declines.
On Thursday, Infantino’s name was on the president’s lips again as he mused about the possibility of moving games scheduled for next summer’s 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’s unveiling of Operation Summer Heat, in the company of FBI director Kash Patel and attorney general Pam Bondi at the White House.
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.
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“Boston has a bad mayor who at least is a reasonable IQ person,” Trump said of Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu.
RM Block
“I mean, Boston, she’s got four areas that are ... wrong. Somebody said would we think about taking the World Cup away from Boston if they don’t 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 – 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’re gonna take those World Cup games and move them somewhere else.”
Wu had already rejected Trump’s assertion on a Wednesday podcast, pointing out the logistics and contractual details with Boston had already been “locked down” with Fifa, “so that no single person, even if they live in the White House, currently, can do it”.
Trump’s 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. “He wouldn’t love to do it, but he’d do it.” Not according to the football body’s 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.
“It’s Fifa’s tournament, Fifa’s 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’s the beauty of our game: that it is bigger than any individual and bigger than any country.”
The respective mayors of the Democratic cities singled out for salvation must wish they could rid themselves of Trump’s attentions as easily.
“This is just the beginning,” 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 – enough to kill 55 million Americans – and gang arrests up by 200 per cent.
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 “drug den” where overdoses and murders occurred. Under Operation Summer Heat, agents had gone in and closed the place down.
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’s mayor, Brandon Johnson; and protesters outraged by the heavy-handed tactics of Ice agents in the city. Now, other cities look set to follow.
“I think we can make San Francisco – one of our great cities ten years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess,” Trump said on Thursday.
“Every 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.”
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.
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 “horrific” on a recent podcast.
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’s global football jamboree.
“But that really was just preparatory work for what we are going to do with the surge – we are going to have a surge of strong, good people,” Trump vowed of what is to come.
“Patriots. And they go in and straighten it all out.”
