Demoralized

The irrationality is what makes it frightening, but it isn't going to win—take heart!

Eugène Delacroix, 1831, La Bataille de Nancy, depicting the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the hands of the armies of Lorraine and the Swiss Confederacy in 1477 (I have an idea Charles has just been knocked off the white horse at right, but such was the slaughter among his troops that his body wasn't discovered until two days later), via Wikipedia.

On the disaster that befell the US Men’s National Team in the soccer World Cup, starting with their fine (if not unexpected) 2-0 win against Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1, marred late in the game when my favorite player of the year, US birthright citizen Folarin Balogun, stepped on the ankle of a Bosnian player and was shown a red card, meaning he was suspended not only for the rest of that game but also for all of the next, a much more challenging match against top-ranked Belgium, on Monday. That was disappointing, especially with the feeling that the referee’s call had been questionable—you knew Balogun hadn’t committed such an infraction intentionally—but that’s sports, rules are sacred, and there’s no appeal on this. What fans could say, at that point, was that our team had done well (especially by the generally dismal American standards, probably the best US men’s team since 1930), and would do their best against Belgium, and might even win, because every tournament has its miracles, and even miracles in which virtue is rewarded.

Then, on Sunday, we heard that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (from the English “association football” in contradistinction, I believe, to “rugby football”) had decided to reverse the red card decision, and Balogun would be permitted to play on Monday after all; and soon afterwards it began to emerge that the decision had essentially been made by the two people in the world who should have stayed farthest away from it, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, the sycophant who won Trump’s heart by awarding him an imaginary “FIFA Peace Prize” on the basis of nobody knows what process.

(Infantino also became the subject of a criminal complaint, a few days before the tournament opened, from the iconic French footballer Michel Platini, who would have been president of FIFA himself if not for allegations of fraud against FIFA for which he has since been exonerated and which, he now allages, were orchestrated in a “conspiracy of false accusations and influence peddling“ by Infantino and his confederates, who in this telling literally stole the job.)

Plenty have shown up to argue that this vile crony conspiracy to break the competition rules was actually good presidential policy, “advocat[ing] for American interests with a doggedness that borders on obsession,” said Nicole Russell at USA Today, and then there was this dreadful column by Ian O’Connor at NYT’s The Athletic:

If any U.S. president could make a call to a friendly FIFA suit to … ahem … see if anything could be done to ensure the home team isn’t getting screwed, that call should absolutely be made. After The Athletic’s Dan Sheldon and Adam Crafton broke the news that Balogun would be available to face Belgium, they also reported that Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Andrew Giuliani of the White House’s World Cup task force, and U.S. Soccer donor Scott Goodwin had assembled a team of lawyers to apply a full-court press.

The plan worked.

Young Giuliani’s greatest achievement in Trump 1.0 was sourcing the enormous spread of cold burgers and Domino’s pizza served at the White House to the Clemson Tigers in March 2019, I didn’t realize he was still working for them. That he and Lutnick should be managing the administration’s share of the World Cup responsibilities suggests that anything going right is probably being done by state governments working with Mexico and Canada.

While Trump and DHS ensure that fans from Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire, Iran, and Senegal are totally or almost totally barred, along with severe restrictions. on those from Algeria, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, and Morocco, along with a bunch of countries whose teams hadn’t qualified, including of course Somalia, home of the highly regarded referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan, who instead of getting to do the job he was contracted to do was questioned for 11 hours when he arrived in Miami and then deported (he will be paid for the games he was prevented from officiating). And worst of all, the shameful treatment of the Iranian squad, kept in Tijuana though all their games were scheduled in the US, only allowed into the US the day before the match (two days for the last one) and forced to go back to Mexico immediately after the final whistle, keeping them exhausted throughout the tournament.

I fail to see how any of this is in American interests unless it’s in American interests to reinforce international stereotypes of Americans as parochial xenophobes and “exceptionalist” bullies who think they have a God-given right to ignore the law and oppress the weak.

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In my corner of the Internet, we came fairly early to the conclusion that it would be better for the USMNT to turn the corrupt Trump-Infantino deal down and play the Belgium match without their star striker. They’d probably lose, but they’d retain their dignity, and as I said before miracles do happen (the day before England’s Jarell Quansah had gotten a red card in the match against Mexico and won that match anyway, while playing a man short).

Of course I don’t blame the team for what happened instead with their catastrophic 4-1 loss to Belgium, but it really did feel as if they were being punished. As Martin Longman (a real soccer player himself, which I am nowhere near, though I used to have a bunch of foreign friends to run around the pitch with when I was in grad school) writes,

Unfortunately, Pochettino did play him, and the result was predictable. The team, which had been playing with unprecedented pride, skill and confidence, was deluged with criticism as cheaters from every corner of the world. They came out and played like deer in the headlights. They were hesitant and error-prone. They gave up four goals, three of which involved mind-bogglingly poor defensive play.

They were humiliated by their own performance and then dunked on by the entire planet for getting what they deserved. As they sobbed on the field, I felt helpless and so deeply sad. I didn’t care that they lost. Beating Belgium was going to be difficult and I was no more than hopeful that they could pull it off. What I cared about is that the president had branded them for all of history, in a World Cup that they were hosting, as the team that cheated and then was crushed.

The team had become demoralized by their encounter with Trump corruption—lost their morale, which I think you can describe (maybe stretching the etymology farther than it should be allowed to go) as the collective equivalent of individual morality, the mutual morality that sustains the members of a team or squad, especially military, in their relation to one another, in the courage and trust required of them. We’re told the French word démoraliser, to “demoralize”, was coined at the peak of the French Revolution, in 1793, before it degenerated into Terror.

Demoralizing is another way of describing what Trump does to us, with his extraordinarily naked selfishness, a man completely without fellow feeling or compunction. I think it explains what happened to President Joe Biden in that catastrophic 2024 debate—that caused him literally to choke so he couldn’t speak above a whisper. It wasn’t senility, as I tried to explain (”Kenobi vs. Vader“) at the time, it was shock at being asked to respond to the mix of brazen mendacity and sheer craziness in Trump’s first answer (to a question from Tapper on increases in the national debt):

Because the tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen just prior to COVID, and even after COVID. It was so strong that we were able to get through COVID much better than just about any other country. But we spurred – that tax spurred. Now, when we cut the taxes – as an example, the corporate tax was cut down to 21 percent from 39 percent, plus beyond that – we took in more revenue with much less tax and companies were bringing back trillions of dollars back into our country. The country was going like never before. And we were ready to start paying down debt. We were ready to start using the liquid gold right under our feet, the oil and gas right under our feet. We were going to have something that nobody else has had. We got hit with COVID. We did a lot to fix it. I gave him an unbelievable situation, with all of the therapeutics and all of the things that we came up with. We – we gave him something great. Remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it. More people died under his administration than our administration, and we were right in the middle of it. Something which a lot of people don’t like to talk about, but he had far more people dying in his administration. He did the mandate, which is a disaster. Mandating it. The vaccine went out. He did a mandate on the vaccine, which is the thing that people most objected to about the vaccine. And he did a very poor job, just a very poor job. And I will tell you, not only poor there, but throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership. They don’t respect the United States anymore. We’re like a Third World nation. Between weaponization of his election, trying to go after his political opponent, all of the things he’s done, we’ve become like a Third World nation. And it’s a shame the damage he’s done to our country. And I’d love to ask him, and will, why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country

And I think it’s really what we’re seeing in the Democratic Party since the 2024 election, in our astonishment not just at Trump’s inexplicable but over-explained victory, but at the way his extraordinary corruption, his monumental stupidity, and his gargantuan appetite for ego gratification all seem to have intensified in the intervening years, and nobody apparently able to stop him. Irrationality is powerful! And frightening!

Which leaves us lacking in confidence, fearful of mistakes, and suspicious of one another (as in the endless contention between “leftists” and “centrists”, which is really over tactics when we should be thinking about strategy). And it is taking an exhaustingly long time to win, especially when you recognize the complexity, as we do and they don’t. But we are winning at last now, in court and in polls, and they don’t have any morale to demoralize them from (imagine how much those Trump people hate and scheme against each other, how cowardly they are one on one, how whiplashed by the continual changing of their messages). Take heart.