Last Week, This Morning
The World Cup, the West Wing, and the world's first trillionaire. I had a lot to say about last week.
The Men’s World Cup
Last week, the men’s World Cup started! Teams from all over the world, 48 of them in fact, descended on host countries U.S., Mexico, and Canada to kick off five and a half weeks of soccer.
The Iranian soccer team finally got their visas just ten days before the start of the tournament, but many of their support staff were excluded from the U.S., where the team will have to enter and leave the country on the same day of all their matches, while they wait for news on whether the president of one of the host countries will bomb their homeland to oblivions.
Omar Artan, who would have made history as the first Somali referee at the World Cup, was denied entry at the border despite having all of his paperwork. Aymen Hussein, an Iraqi striker, was detained at the airport for over seven hours before he was finally allowed into the country. And fans from several countries faced the prospect of bonds for up to $15,000 to enter the U.S. for their games. And while some host committees claim that the Trump regime will not be sending ICE to the games, the regime itself has made no such claims.
Meanwhile (and apologies to those of you who have heard this from me already this week), the average ticket price for this year’s World Cup final is $13,000. That’s right - the average ticket price. This World Cup has the most expensive tickets of any World Cup yet, and got rid of the tier of cheap tickets for host country citizens.
But at the same time, there's Japanese poetry about endless chips and salsa, and the English are discovering ribs. The Scottish have taken over the Boston Cop slide. Brazilians are dancing in Times Square. In Kansas, the Algerian team’s training center is bringing endless joy to the town it’s in.Two of the U.S. goals in our marvelous win over the weekend were scored by Folarin Balogun, a Nigerian American, raised in London, American by virtue of the very birthright citizenship Trump wants to overturn. As much as this cup has U.S. fascism at its center, so too does it showcase the best of us - our generosity and spirit of adventure, the dream at the center of a nation built on ideas, where everyone can make a home as long as they too subscribe to the idea that we are all equal, that we rise and fall together, and that nothing matters more than than our willingness to commit to this project. We haven’t realized that dream yet, but what a wonderful reminder of what we could be if we did.
I love men’s World Cup soccer. I love the drama of it, and the team dynamics. I love watching players from opposing teams help each other up. I love their homoerotic goal celebrations, and their temper tantrums. I love how silly they look when they are diving. It’s not women’s soccer, which I’m not going to lie, I find more skillful and with better teamwork. But so much of what I wrote about the Olympics early this year is true for the men’s World Cup, and the women’s World Cup as well, that this is the kind of world I want to live in. The one where we have time and space to play, where we come together to do something hard and fun just for the sake of it, where the whole world watches something together.
But, I wrote this about the Olympics too, and the World Cup a few years ago. We can’t separate politics from our sports. We can’t separate sports from the context in which they are played, from what athletes use their platforms to promote, from the culture of fame and accountability and the lack thereof. We cannot separate this World Cup from widening wealth inequality, from draconian immigration policies, from war or strife. We can only try to use this moment to remember that we are all connected, that we can do hard things, and that the world we believe in is worth fighting for, not least because we’ll get to watch more soccer.
The West Wing
Last week, Trump posted a clip from the tv show The West Wing to justify his planned airstrikes on Iran. In the clip, President Bartlet rails against the idea of a proportional military response a fundamentalist group shooting down an air force transport carrying his doctor as well as many others. Trump appeared to use the clip in justification for his own disproportional response to Iran shooting down a U.S. helicopter.
There are a lot of reasons why this is absurd. First, the whole point of the episode is that the president wants to use the U.S. military to avenge a personal grief, and he is eventually convinced to spare civilians in his much more measured counter attack. The whole point of the episode is that just because we have the power to do something doesn’t mean that we should. Second, President Barlet would hate Trump. Third, Martin Sheen and most of the cast are voracious campaigners for Democrats.
But more than anything else, Trump’s use of this clip is absurd because The West Wing is the antithesis of everything Trump stands for. At its heart, it’s a show about people who want to make the country, and the world a better place. They are flawed, at times arrogant, at times uncertain; at times humbled by the magnitude of their responsibility, rising to it and failing, but all the while focused on what it means to serve the people by working in government.
The West Wing has gotten a lot of flak in the years since it ended. Some of it is deserved - it was very much of its time when it came to its interpretation of the U.S.’s relationship with the Middle East, including some casual racism, and a commitment to the rather shallow, self congratulatory clash of civilizations trope. But much of the criticism also amounts to deriding it as a cringey, naive representation of politics - where the bad guys are bad, and people you disagree with are still trying to do their best to make the world better, where politics is a game of persuasion rather than wealth and influence. And to that I’d say The West Wing might be a bit cringey, and it might be a bit naive, but more than that, it is aspirational.
I want to live in a world where my preeminent disagreement with Republicans is over how we make the country and the world better for all of us, rather than whether or not we should. I want to live in a world where persuasion is powerful, where we have hard conversations, and where our compromises still meet our needs. I want leaders who wrestle with tough questions, who feel the weight of their responsibility, and who believe in getting up every day and trying again, no matter what.
On the day after Trump was elected in 2016, I went home and immediately put on The West Wing. I watched the show live as a child, and I’ve been rewatching it on syndication, DVD, and streaming platforms ever since. And I knew that if I didn’t pick it back up immediately, it would become harder and harder to turn to as Trump overshadowed our politics. And now, as he continues to plunder our country to enrich himself, as he sells hate and division as our national story, as he demands the tribute and fealty of a king, as he throws incoherent temper tantrums on social media and in front of the press, I will keep going back to The West Wing as I always do. Not because it’s perfect, or because it’s accurate, but because it reminds me that the stories we tell about ourselves, and our politics are important.
Well, and because I find its political fantasy and iambic pentameter soothing. I can admit that too.
The World’s First Trillionaire
Last week, Elon Musk took his company SpaceX public, and in the process became the world’s first trillionaire. He is now worth 7 orders of magnitude more than I make in a year - actually more than 7 orders of magnitude because I rounded my salary up to make the math easier. And I’m fairly well off.
As Elon Musk enjoys his new net worth, however, I would like to bring us back to the first few weeks of Trump’s second term as president, and the Department of Government Efficiency, an Elon Musk brain child that Trump launched via executive order on Inauguration Day, January 20th 2025. DOGE was responsible for a lot of the chaos and corruption of the early part of Trump’s term, but it’s the shuttering of USAID that should be our focus now. Internally lauded as one of our most efficient government agencies, responsible for saving 92 million lives over the course of its history, USAID was also a brick in our national security and public health, providing early warning systems for diseases that could become pandemic and building relationships in countries across the world.
On February 3, 2025 Elon Musk tweeted that he spent the weekend “feeding USAID to the woodchipper,” which meant that across the world people started showing up to clinics and food banks and shelters expecting life saving aid, and were instead turned away to decide which of their children to feed, what to do with sick and pregnant relatives, and where to safely spend the night.
Conservative estimates one year after the closure of USAID suggest that the world’s first trillionaire is responsible for the deaths of over 750,000 people.
Action Needed
Project 2025 is at it again. New rules proposed by the OMB now threaten the very integrity of the infrastructure of scientific study in the United States. Across the whole of government, the Trump regime defunds scientific inquiry, studies in health care and disease prevention, the search for cures. They are dismantling the ocean monitoring system critical to studying climate change.
We have a chance to put a stop to new OMB rules, and to push Congress to take action to protect science. You can learn more and take action here.