Go Ahead, Try and Tune Him Out
Nine years ago, The Onion wrote a fake Trump editorial about infecting every corner of your daily life. He’s since gotten a lot better at it.
There’s an Onion article I think about all the time. It ran on October 23, 2017, nine months into the first Trump administration, and it was framed as an editorial written by Trump himself: “Happy Monday, Everyone! Looking Forward To Another Week Of Infecting Every Aspect Of Your Daily Lives!”
The conceit is that Trump, bragging in the first person, wants you to understand there will be no getting away from him. Not during your morning coffee, not while you stare at a sunset. “I am inescapable,” the fake Trump gloats, before running through the aspects of American life he’s already wrecked and promising to get around to the rest. The piece closes with a list of everything he might poison that particular week: the World Series, Halloween, rollercoasters, Christmas trees, birthday cake, the new iPhone. You get the idea.
The article gets passed around again every few months because it keeps being right. But I think the joke has aged in a way that nobody at The Onion could have predicted, and “satire became reality” doesn’t quite cover what happened to it.
Here’s what I mean.
He spent this past week inserting himself into the men’s World Cup, of all things. An American player got suspended over a red card, the White House decided that wouldn’t do, and after days of pressure, FIFA let him play. Half the soccer world is still furious about it.
A red card. At the World Cup. The machinery of the United States government cranked up because a soccer player was told to sit out one game.
The 2017 version of this bit was about our attention. The Onion’s Trump ruined the World Series by showing up in your head while you tried to watch it. He was an intrusive thought, a name you couldn’t stop hearing. Today’s version involves him actually inserting himself into stories. He calls the president of FIFA to strongarm the organization for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s benefit. He hosts the Kennedy Center Honors. He headlines the country’s birthday party. He puts his face on the money and his name on your kid’s savings account.
Trying to tune him out was a you problem in 2017. In 2026, he really is inescapable.
So. About that red card.
“I didn’t know what the hell a red card was”
Last Wednesday night, during the 2-0 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina that pushed the US men’s national team into the knockout round, striker Folarin Balogun got tangled up with a defender while chasing a ball and came down on the back of the guy’s leg. The referee saw it happen and let play continue. Then the video review officials stepped in, the referee got sent to a monitor to watch the collision again in slow motion, and out came a red card. FIFA’s rulebook is blunt on this point: a red card brings an automatic one-game suspension. Balogun, the team’s leading scorer, would sit out the round of 16 against Belgium. It was a huge blow to Team USA’s chances in the tournament.
That wouldn’t last.
Andrew Giuliani (yes, Rudy’s son, and yes, he runs the White House’s World Cup task force) told ESPN that conversations about rescuing Balogun’s eligibility started immediately after the ejection. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who’d watched the game from a seat next to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, got on the phone that night to find out what could be done. A senior US official told the AP that the debate over the card ate up the entire flight from Santa Clara back to Washington. And NBC News reported that the days after that were spent in strategy sessions about how the federal government could help U.S. Soccer’s lawyers put together their argument.
On Thursday, Trump called Infantino personally. Back in December, FIFA handed Trump its inaugural “FIFA Peace Prize” at the World Cup draw, a ceremony held at the Kennedy Center (more on that building in a bit), and Infantino gave him $15,000 worth of tickets, part of the nearly $120,000 in free sports tickets from executives, owners, and allies that showed up on Trump’s most recent financial disclosure. After news of the call broke, Infantino put out a statement confirming it, noting that he hears from heads of state all the time, and insisting the case sat with FIFA’s independent judicial bodies. Sure, sure, sure.
On Sunday, those independent judicial bodies set the suspension aside, citing a provision that lets FIFA’s disciplinary committee pause a punishment and put a player on probation instead.
The rest of the soccer world reacted about how you’d expect. UEFA, Europe’s governing body, expressed its disbelief at a decision it called “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable” and warned that a competition loses its credibility when the people guarding the rules stop enforcing them. Belgium’s federation said it was astonished, demanded to see the reasoning, and had its appeal tossed on the grounds that it had no standing to file one. Belgium’s coach, Rudi Garcia, told reporters he’d learned that at this World Cup, “the 5th of July is actually the first of April. It’s April Fools.” Wayne Rooney went on the BBC and called the whole thing a disgrace that Infantino ought to be ashamed of. And Herculez Gomez, the former USMNT player turned ESPN analyst, said what everybody watching already suspected: “It feels like the host nation is gaining a favor here.”
Trump spent Monday explaining himself, sort of. He’d asked Infantino for a review, he told reporters, because he’d watched the play and decided no foul had occurred, and he admitted he had no idea what a red card even was until someone explained the suspension that came with it. He described the play as “two great athletes that crashed into each other.” He insisted, repeatedly, that he never told Infantino what to do and that a committee made the call. And then he pronounced the referee “a little bit suspect” and encouraged the assembled press to go dig through the man’s record.
Nobody has produced evidence that Trump’s call is what flipped FIFA’s decision, and to be clear, I’m not claiming it did. But oh boy, this sure is a great example of him inserting himself into the story.
And then the US lost to Belgium 4-1 and crashed out of its own World Cup.
All of it for nothing.
He found a way to ruin the Knicks, too
The World Cup episode stands out because he changed the conditions of the competition itself. Most of the time, showing up is enough.
On June 8, Trump accepted an invitation from James Dolan, his longtime friend and the owner of the Knicks, and went to Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden. No sitting president had ever attended an NBA Finals game. And the Knicks hadn’t hosted one in 27 years, so that night should’ve belonged to the most famously starved fan base in basketball. Instead, the neighborhood got a 12-block security perimeter staffed by hundreds of NYPD officers. It shut out anyone without a ticket, killed the street watch parties that had formed outside the Garden for Games 1 and 2, and left the vendors selling Knicks gear on the sidewalk wondering where everyone went.
Inside, Trump watched from a suite fitted with bulletproof glass, next to Dolan. When his face appeared on the big screens during the anthem and stayed up for close to eight seconds, the crowd booed him so hard that the reception for the visiting Spurs sounded warm by comparison. Asked about it afterward, he told reporters: “It was, I think, mostly cheers.” Sure, sure.
The Knicks lost, by the way. They hadn’t lost a game in 46 days.
Before Game 4, fans gathered outside the Garden to burn sage, hoping to clear out whatever he’d left behind. One of them walked Variety through the evidence: he picked the Chiefs to win, and they lost. He went to a Mets game, and they lost. He came to the Garden, and the Knicks lost. “He’s a curse to every team that he picks.” The Onion’s Trump bragged about finding a way to ruin Twix bars. The real one has New Yorkers performing smoke rituals outside a basketball arena.
And the Garden was one stop on a tour. In his first eight months back in office, he hit the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, UFC cards in Miami and Newark, the NCAA wrestling championships, the Club World Cup final, and the US Open men’s final, getting booed at the last two. Every one of these visits works the same way. The streets close, the perimeter goes up, the anthem plays, the cameras find him, and whatever you actually came to watch runs second.
The party, the buildings, the money, the babies
Sports are the small version of this. The country’s actual birthday got the full treatment.
Trump billed his Fourth of July speech on the National Mall, the centerpiece of America’s 250th anniversary, as a “TRUMP RALLY”, and he delivered one, pushing his election overhaul bill and warning that communists were on the march. Congress created a nonpartisan commission back in 2016 to plan the semiquincentennial; his Freedom 250 operation largely shoved that body aside and fenced off much of the Mall. And when the musical acts booked for Freedom 250’s kickoff event backed out en masse rather than be associated with him, he fixed it by announcing he’d headline the thing himself. The entertainment canceled, so he became the entertainment.
And the Kennedy Center, where FIFA staged its Peace Prize ceremony? Trump fired its trustees in 2025, and the replacements he picked elected him chairman and voted his name onto the building, a renaming a federal judge has since ruled illegal. He hosted the Kennedy Center Honors in December, drawing the lowest TV ratings in the show’s history, while ticket sales fell and performers kept canceling.
The physical city is getting the same treatment. He tore down the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom, his name or image has gone up on the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Justice Department’s headquarters, and he’s pushing a triumphal arch overlooking the Potomac. On the Fourth itself, his Domestic Policy Council released a report declaring that the people who run the Smithsonian “can’t be trusted”.
Then there’s the money. Treasury drafted a $1 anniversary coin with Trump’s profile on the front and, on the back, Trump raising his fist over the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT”. Federal law bars living presidents from US currency, a practice that exists, per the San Francisco Fed, to keep the country from resembling a monarchy. Nine Democratic senators have urged Treasury to reject it, warning against the appearance of a “cult of personality.” But in March, the federal arts commission he stacked with his own appointees approved a 24-karat gold commemorative coin bearing his image, with the Treasury secretary using his authority over gold coinage to route around that law. The commission was told the president had personally selected the design.
And then there are the babies. This week, the White House held an event promoting newborn savings accounts that are called, officially, Trump Accounts. They launched over the holiday weekend, timed to the 250th, with a $1,000 government contribution for eligible babies born during his term. He rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange to promote them Monday morning. The Onion’s list of things he might taint topped out at Christmas trees and birthday cake. Reality reached the maternity ward and beyond.
People have noticed. There’s data. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans think the 250th anniversary events have become too political, including three-quarters of Democrats and half of Republicans. And the Reuters Institute’s global survey found that 40% of people now say they sometimes or often avoid the news, tied for the highest share ever recorded. In 2017, the year The Onion ran its piece, it was 29%. Record numbers of people are trying to look away. The trouble is where they look: the game, the holiday, the arena, their kid’s bank account. He is everywhere.
On July 19, somebody is going to win the World Cup. The final is at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and whichever team survives to reach it, its captain will climb the podium at the end of the night to lift the most famous trophy in sports. Trump plans to be up there too. Infantino confirmed it last month: the two of them will watch the final side by side and be “handing the trophy to the winner – of course, together.” He ran the dress rehearsal last summer, awkwardly planting himself in the middle of Chelsea’s celebration at the Club World Cup final and staying put while the players hoisted the trophy around him.
It’s going to be a long… [checks calendar]… two and a half years more of this.