By Michael Phillips | Riptide | Dead Reckoning
Most of what got labeled “anti-American” commentary this week wasn’t. George Conway — no stranger to criticizing this president, and married for over a decade to one of his closest White House advisers before their divorce — said outright that Folarin Balogun’s red card was wrong and that he wanted him on the field. That a critic this practiced still landed there is worth noting on its own.
Virginia congressman James Walkinshaw’s statement made the same point from the other side of the aisle: the card shouldn’t have happened, the suspension shouldn’t have happened, and “Balogun is the only one demonstrating class and good judgment” in the entire affair.
UEFA, Sepp Blatter, Wayne Rooney, Gary Neville, and Italy’s football federation president — actual disinterested parties, with no domestic political stake whatsoever — all objected to how FIFA handled the reprieve too, and not one of them has any reason to care whether the United States beats Belgium.
Even Dave Portnoy, no one’s idea of a Trump skeptic, spent Monday mocking the idea that any American would want Balogun benched.
Disliking the process is not the same thing as disliking the team, and this week produced a lot of the former and very little of the latter.
Very little. Not none.
Disliking the process is not the same thing as disliking the team.
On Sunday, one widely shared post did something different: “As a US citizen, I will be rooting for Belgium to win this game. Not because I don’t love my country, but… the US has proven to the world we have absolutely none” — integrity, he meant, the sentence before having run out of it. That is not a complaint about FIFA’s Article 27 discretion, or a demand that the Disciplinary Committee publish its reasoning, or even an argument that Balogun should have sat out. It is a stated preference that eleven Americans lose a World Cup knockout match, offered as a form of protest against a phone call none of them made.
Sit with the sentence “not because I don’t love my country” for a second, because it’s doing exactly the opposite of what it claims. Loving a country and loving whoever currently holds its highest office are different things — that distinction is older than this administration and will outlast it, and it is usually deployed, correctly, in defense of people who criticize their government without hating their country. But it runs in both directions.
Loving a country and loving whoever currently holds its highest office are different things.
If patriotism doesn’t collapse into support for one man, then it also can’t collapse into opposition to one man — and rooting against your own team in an actual World Cup match, specifically because that man made a phone call, is patriotism collapsing into exactly that. You cannot claim the distinction protects you while making the team’s fate a referendum on the president anyway. That’s not independence from Trump. That’s dependence on him, just with the sign flipped.
If patriotism doesn’t collapse into support for one man, then it also can’t collapse into opposition to one man.
There’s also a tidier story going around about how we got here, and it doesn’t survive contact with what people actually said. The version is that the same crowd spent last week holding Balogun up as a hero of birthright citizenship, and has now, one week later, turned on him. That’s not what happened, because he was never the subject of last week’s argument either. The “Birthright citizen!” posts weren’t a tribute to him — they were pointed at the administration, at the irony of officials fighting to narrow birthright citizenship in court while leaning on it for one player. Balogun was the coincidence that made the argument possible, not the point of it. Nothing about him changed in a week. What changed is that the same habit — treating him as a stand-in for an argument about someone else — got pointed in a different direction. Last week, he was Exhibit A in a case against the administration. This week, for a small number of people, he’s collateral in the same case. He was never actually the subject either time. He just kept playing.
Rooting for his failure is not a rebuke of Donald Trump. It is a rebuke of a rookie who did nothing but get born in Brooklyn, choose a country in Florida, and play the match he was legally entitled to play.
It also lands on the wrong people. Mauricio Pochettino made the case for his own team better than anyone defending them online has: the U.S. played thirty-five minutes a man down in a knockout match, gained no advantage from any of this, and is “neither the victim nor the villain” of the story. The cost of a bad process already landed on the players, not on the person who made the calls. Wanting them to lose on top of that doesn’t punish anyone in the White House. It punishes Chris Richards, who played the match down a man; it punishes a 25-year-old striker who, by every account of how he’s actually handled this, has been the calmest adult in the entire saga — declining to react out of anger, saying only that he wanted to keep proving to the fans who’d backed him that he’d made the right call. Rooting for his failure is not a rebuke of Donald Trump. It is a rebuke of a rookie who did nothing but get born in Brooklyn, choose a country in Florida, and play the match he was legally entitled to play.
There is a real, serious version of this week’s criticism, and it deserves to keep being taken seriously: FIFA owes the public an explanation it has not given, and every party who spoke Monday — Infantino, the White House — gave volume without substance. That critique is compatible with wanting the team to go all the way. It is, in fact, strengthened by it, because the person making it can say plainly that the process and the players are two separate questions. The version that collapses those two questions — that turns a governance complaint into a wish for your own country’s defeat — isn’t a more intense form of the same argument. It’s a different argument, a worse one, and it deserves to be called exactly what it is: not principle, just spite wearing principle’s clothes.
The version that collapses those two questions — that turns a governance complaint into a wish for your own country’s defeat — isn’t a more intense form of the same argument. It’s a different argument, a worse one, and it deserves to be called exactly what it is: not principle, just spite wearing principle’s clothes.
Sourcing: George Conway’s remarks are per his post on X, July 6, 2026. Rep. James Walkinshaw’s statement was reported by Tyler Englander. UEFA’s statement, Sepp Blatter’s remarks, Wayne Rooney’s and Gary Neville’s comments, and Italy federation president Giovanni Malagò’s statement are per this publication’s prior reporting in “The Suspension of the Suspension.” Dave Portnoy’s post is per X, July 6, 2026. Mauricio Pochettino’s remarks on the U.S. being “neither victim nor villain” are per The Athletic and The New York Times, as previously reported. Balogun’s comments on responding without anger are per NPR.
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