Megan Rapinoe says President Trump is why the U.S. men's soccer team got bounced from the World Cup — a perfect distillation of the progressive reflex to blame Trump and America first, personal accountability never.
Rapinoe, the retired women's soccer star turned activist, used her podcast "A Touch More: The Beautiful Game" to argue that Trump's involvement in a red card controversy "got to the team" and doomed the squad's chances. Her evidence? Vibes.
"I think the distraction got to the team for sure in some type of way," Rapinoe said, according to the Daily Caller. "Whether it was, you know, this red card situation, whether it was being in a public discourse with this president, all of the, you know, shenanigans and chaos that comes with the feelings on both sides of that."
Here's what actually happened. U.S. forward Folarin Balogun caught a bogus red card ahead of the Belgium match. Trump called FIFA to request a review. FIFA then permitted Balogun to compete — applying the exact same rule that allowed Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo to play under similar circumstances. Trump didn't create the distraction; he fixed an injustice against an American player.
But in Rapinoe's telling, the president advocating for a U.S. athlete is "shenanigans and chaos." The real chaos was the bad call that nearly sidelined an American starter.
Rapinoe has built a career on conflating athletic platforms with political stages. Now, from the outside looking in, she's spinning a story where a president standing up for an American player is somehow the reason the team lost. Not coaching. Not execution. Not Belgium. Trump.
The Daily Caller framed the story as Rapinoe piling on the anti-Trump bandwagon, noting that "anybody who has a brain saw that the call on Balogun was horrible." The outlet's editorializing aside, the core dispute is straightforward: did Trump's FIFA intervention hurt or help the team? The answer is it helped — Balogun got to play.
Rapinoe's argument boils down to this: the mere existence of Trump in the discourse is so destabilizing that professional athletes can't handle it. That's not an analysis of a soccer match. It's a confession that the progressive mind can't process any event without making Trump the protagonist.
The U.S. team lost. That's on the pitch. But in the woke sports ecosystem, failure is never personal — it's always political, and it's always someone else's fault.
The question ordinary Americans ought to ask: why does a retired player's podcast take get treated as news at all?
