President Donald Trump appears at a FIFA Club World Cup 2025 match at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium on July 13, 2025. Eva Marie Uzcategui/FIFA via Getty Images
President Donald Trump reignited the ire the world over with his recent meddling in the World Cup, but according to his one-time first-term whistleblower, the scandal exposes a fundamental truth about Trump's worldview that he saw firsthand in the White House.
Earlier this week, FIFA overruled a suspension for the U.S. Men's National Team's star striker, Folarin Balogun, allowing him to take part in a much-anticipated round of 16 match against Belgium. Without Balogun, many observers gave the U.S. even worse odds than usual to win the match.
The USMT ultimately lost, but not after becoming embroiled in scandal after Trump claimed to have called FIFA leaders about their call against the striker. While Trump claimed that he only asked for a review, speculation soon ran rampant that he had exerted pressure to reverse the suspension, a damning accusation of the sort of corruption that the organization has dealt with for decades.
Miles Taylor previously worked in Trump's first-term Department of Homeland Security and became famous for an initially anonymous New York Times op-ed where he criticized the administration from within. In a Tuesday piece published by The i Paper, Taylor said that the situation had cost the U.S. "decades of hard-fought credibility," and argued that "the moment a head of state phones the head of world football trying to push for special treatment for his own team’s star player, and a favourable ruling follows within hours, the belief in impartiality dies instantly."
Overall, however, Taylor said that the situation playing out as it did was not a surprise to him, as he had witnessed similar disdain for judges, the "referees of our democracy," in Trump's White House, which he called "a pattern too obvious to ignore."
"Trump would intimidate them publicly on social media, work the higher-ups privately, and when the rulings still went against him, attack the legitimacy of the refs’ robes," Taylor wrote. "I vividly remember one such Oval Office meeting. The sky was dark outside as a half dozen of us sat on the couches in front of the Resolute desk, listening to Trump complain that the courts were making him look weak politically. They were striking down his orders left and right, and no one was giving him good ideas to fix the problem. 'We need to get rid of the judges,' the President declared, pounding a fist on the desk. He was particularly angry at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for reversing his decisions. 'They are ruining this.'”
He continued later: "A man who thinks that way about federal judges was never going to think differently about a FIFA disciplinary panel. FIFA simply proved easier to move than the American judiciary. This time, the referees folded."