{"id":450,"date":"2026-07-07T09:08:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T09:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=450"},"modified":"2026-07-07T09:08:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T09:08:57","slug":"america-land-of-the-cheats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=450","title":{"rendered":"America: land of the cheats"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u201cBall don\u2019t lie.\u201d This phrase, originally attributed to NBA star Rasheed Wallace, comes from American basketball culture and implies that, no matter what the referees or back-office bureaucrats do to intervene in the game, the ball will end up where it should. If it goes through the net, the sporting gods wanted it to happen. The best team wins. Always. In the 57th minute of America\u2019s game against Belgium, when US keeper Matt Freese came out of his box to deal with a long ball, only to have it stolen from his feet and fired into the back of the net for Belgium\u2019s third goal \u2014 when that happened, Wallace\u2019s sense of sporting justice was surely validated.<\/p>\n

Read more Meet Ulster\u2019s young Orangemen<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, Donald Trump may have personally intervened with Fifa to get Folarin Balogun, America\u2019s star striker, an exception on the red card he\u2019d earned in the previous match. But having Daddy Warbucks pull strings for your side can take an athletic effort only so far: in the end, Belgium won the game 4-1. Money and power cannot buy a World Cup. Qatar is a partial exception, but even in the case of the 2022 competition, the team got nowhere close to holding the World Cup trophy over their heads while confetti streamed down.<\/p>\n

Corruption in Fifa, much less professional soccer, is hardly new. For years, if not decades, rumors swirled around top Italian club Juventus\u2019s strange habit of winning games at the last minute on highly suspicious penalty decisions \u2014 suspicions vindicated by the Calciopoli refereeing scandal that, in 2006, got the club stripped of titles and relegated.<\/p>\n

Put aside the fact that Balogun\u2019s red card was indeed dubious. The same could be said of numerous others, Francesco Totti\u2019s red card against South Korea in 2002 being perhaps the most ludicrous. The injustice of the card is not the point. World Cup history is full of calls far worse, against teams with far greater chances of actually winning the competition, from countries who care infinitely more about the sport than the US, which after last night\u2019s defeat will almost certainly return to treating football as a secondary concern.<\/p>\n

What made Trump\u2019s effort to overturn Balogun\u2019s suspension different is what it reveals about the nature of American political life. Bending the rules \u2014 and even outright cheating \u2014 is often deemed acceptable as long as it benefits \u201cour side\u201d. Part of American folklore is the belief that the country represents the \u201clast best hope of earth\u201d \u2014 a phrase that politicians of both parties still deploy, few realizing they\u2019re borrowing from Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n

The 16th president was a man nearly everyone in the establishment still agrees represents the greatest of the American ethos. Yet Lincoln too \u2014 just like Trump \u2014 bent the rules to get his desired result. When the Southern states expressed their desire to leave the Union, Lincoln maintained that they had no such right, even though the foundational premise of the American liberal tradition is governance based on consent. To this day, that element of the Civil War remains underplayed; to even touch it risks ostracism. We are told that Lincoln used the legal mechanisms available to him to make his side, our<\/i> side, prevail, and the arc of history bent toward \u201cjustice\u201d. But who decides what \u201cjustice\u201d really is, and therefore when the established rules and norms are acceptable to break? Those in power, obviously.<\/p>\n

Had Balogun matched his earlier form in the tournament and the US had won instead of Belgium, Trump\u2019s maneuvering to clear the deck for his return would have become the<\/i> story of the World Cup. In typical Trumpian fashion, he would have made a story completely unrelated to him \u2014 the US is finally good at soccer! \u2014 about him. There\u2019s no such thing as bad press, as Trump\u2019s notoriously ruthless consigliere Roy Cohn taught him. It\u2019s a sentiment the President hasn\u2019t ridden just to fame and fortune, but to two of the strangest presidential terms and some of the oddest cultural milestones in the republic\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

Alongside hosting MMA fights on the White House lawn, Trump must now add to his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 exposing the truly bipartisan nature of American enthusiasm for corruption. When it was announced that Balogun\u2019s red card was rescinded, the notoriously kneejerk Left pundits, who have made entire careers out of reflexively condemning everything the man does, all of a sudden flipped on a dime and said, more or less: in this one case, corruption and arm-twisting behind the scenes was good. Why? Because it made our side better off. Our tribe \u2014 in this case the US national team \u2014 had a better chance of winning<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Read more Blue Labour\u2019s last chance<\/a><\/p>\n

In a culture that glorifies winning and encourages its members to see the stakes of not only elections, but competitions for college admission or job placement, as existential contests that validate one\u2019s identity, sport is the only place where shared identity is still allowed. Studies have shown that when a fan\u2019s team wins, their testosterone spikes; researchers famously measured the effect in fans after basketball and World Cup matches. Conversely, when their<\/i> team loses, cortisol surges as though the loss were personal. This occurs, psychologically speaking, because fans\u2019 nervous systems unconsciously treat the objects of their affection not just as extensions of their own identity but, literally, as their own high-stakes competition. So, when American Leftists and other commentators suggested, as Cenk Uygur did on X over the weekend, that Trump\u2019s corruption might be okay in this one particular instance, they were revealing how American politicos \u2014 both Right and Left \u2014 actually think.<\/p>\n

Put aside debates about Trump\u2019s claim that the 2020 election was \u201cstolen\u201d. If you actually spend time around Democratic Party diehards, they, just like their counterparts in the GOP, will openly express admiration for cheating if it\u2019s used to the \u201cright\u201d ends. Lyndon Johnson, possibly the Democratic Party\u2019s greatest-ever legislative architect after Franklin Roosevelt, is lovingly rumored to have instructed his staff to spread rumors that an opponent had sex with farm animals simply to \u201cmake him deny it\u201d in the press. JFK\u2019s father flooded the 1960 primaries with vote-buying efforts, only to have Kennedy joke about the electoral purchases himself, reading from a fake telegram from his father. \u201cDon\u2019t buy a single vote more than is necessary,\u201d it said. \u201cI\u2019ll be damned if I\u2019m going to pay for a landslide.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Democrats are not alone in bending the rules in their favor. Late-20th century political operative Lee Atwater was as notorious as he was admired for his dirty-tricks campaigns against Democratic opponents. Atwater\u2019s legacy is nearly always spoken of positively by GOP operatives. When Atwater rode the infamous \u201cweekend prison pass\u201d attack against Michael Dukakis \u2014 outsourcing a brutal ad to a nominally independent group, so the Bush campaign could maintain plausible deniability\u2014 he showed us the future of America\u2019s political present. A place where nearly every YouTube feed in the country is flooded with attacks that recklessly try to recreate some version of Atwater\u2019s one-dimensional tarring of his Democratic rival.<\/p>\n

But Atwater \u2014 like LBJ, JFK and, lest we forget, Tammany Hall before him \u2014 was loved by his tribe because he carried out his dirty tricks for \u201cour\u201d side. Presuming, of course, you have an active dog in the political race. And while more Americans than ever are disgusted with both parties, nearly everyone watching the red, white and blue on the field at the World Cup still feels the primitive pull of the national tribe.<\/p>\n

In America, when rule-breaking delivers our tribe a win, our objection evaporates. That reflex, not Trump\u2019s phone call, is the genuinely American thing on display. As for Belgium, they shouldn\u2019t just have complained to the press, they should have flat-out threatened to refuse to take the field. Rule-bending for the powerful \u2014 and a public that never mobilizes to stop it \u2014 is the new American face of world football, already on full display.<\/p>\n

But here is the thing about sport that politics can only envy. The game has a court of final appeal that no president can phone. Trump proved he could bend Fifa to his will. But he couldn\u2019t bend the ball. Ninety minutes after the greatest rule-bending intervention in World Cup history, the beneficiary\u2019s team was down 4-1, its goalkeeper face-down in the Seattle turf, consumed with shame, and the entire apparatus of executive pressure had ultimately purchased nothing whatsoever. The sports gods audited the books and issued their correction. Ball don\u2019t lie.<\/p>\n

American politics, however, has no such auditor. No ball and no net. Only the next election to be bent by whichever tribe holds the whip and a public \u2014 Right and Left \u2014 that has quietly agreed to measure every violation by a single standard. Did it help us win?<\/p>\n

Read more Taylor Swift: feudal princess<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBall don\u2019t lie.\u201d This phrase, originally attributed to NBA star Rasheed Wallace, comes from American basketball culture and implies that, no matter what the referees or back-office bureaucrats do to intervene in the game, the ball will end up where it should. If it goes through the net, the sporting gods wanted it to happen. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-cup"],"yoast_head":"\nAmerica: land of the cheats - \u0421ity Flow Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=450\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"America: land of the cheats - \u0421ity Flow Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cBall don\u2019t lie.\u201d This phrase, originally attributed to NBA star Rasheed Wallace, comes from American basketball culture and implies that, no matter what the referees or back-office bureaucrats do to intervene in the game, the ball will end up where it should. 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