The Guardian published a full article this week blaming Donald Trump for the outcomes of sporting events — and that tells you everything about why the establishment press can't be trusted to cover news that actually matters to Americans.
The trigger was the U.S. men's soccer team crashing out of the World Cup with a 4-1 loss to Belgium. Trump had personally asked FIFA president Gianni Infantino to overturn a red card shown to striker Folarin Balogun, according to The Guardian. The card was reversed. Balogun played. The U.S. lost anyway. The Guardian's conclusion: Trump is the problem. They called it "the curse of Donald Trump."
This is not satire. The Guardian assembled a whole catalog of teams that lost after Trump showed up: the Knicks dropping Game 3 of the NBA Finals, the Commanders getting blown out 44-22, rain delays at the Daytona 500, Europe winning the Ryder Cup on American soil, the Miami Hurricanes losing the college football championship. Even the Washington Nationals' Game 5 World Series loss in 2019 made the list — though The Guardian quietly admitted the Nats won the series overall when Trump wasn't in the building for Game 7.
The framing is the story. The Guardian acknowledged that "his policies have far more serious consequences for far more people than the outcomes of the games he insists on attending" — then buried that concession to keep chasing the curse narrative. They quoted Trump's "we're winning so much" speech to Congress, not to inform readers about policy, but to set up a cheap punchline about scoreboard results.
Here's what's actually happening: a major outlet with a global reach decided that correlating a president's attendance at games with those teams' losses constitutes journalism. No policy analysis. No accountability reporting. Just superstitious patter dressed up as commentary, published in the same section where they supposedly cover the most powerful office on earth.
The New York Post, for its part, ran a Babylon Bee satire roundup the same day — a fitting accidental commentary on the state of the press when the satire site and the legacy outlet are competing for the same audience on absurdity.
Ordinary Americans are dealing with inflation, border chaos, and foreign entanglements that drain tax dollars. The Guardian's response is to assign a hex to the president over soccer results. The press doesn't like Trump — that's established. But when that dislike curdles into blaming him for rain delays at NASCAR, it's not bias anymore. It's a meltdown.
The open question isn't whether Trump is bad luck. It's whether outlets this unmoored from basic proportion can ever again be taken seriously as referees of the public square.
