dustin-desoto | Vox

When war becomes a meme

2026-03-25T16:18:11-04:00

A screenshot from a White House X post about the Iran war titled “Operation Epic Fury.” | White House via X/Twitter

Since the war with Iran began, the White House has been posting videos featuring the US military bombing targets in Iran, interspersed with clips from video games, sports highlights, and Hollywood movies. The White House says the videos are meant to highlight the success of the US military.

Some of the captions read like this: “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” Others list goals for “Operation Epic Fury,” including: “Destroy Iran’s missile arsenal,” “Destroy their navy,” and “Ensure they NEVER get a nuclear weapon.” And ending with the words, “Locked in.”

Propaganda has always been a part of war. But it hasn’t always been this unserious.

To better understand how propaganda has been used in the past — and how the White House is using it now — we spoke with Nick Cull, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who specializes in the history of propaganda.

Below is an excerpt from Cull’s conversation with Today, Explained co-host Noel King, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full episode wherever you get podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In a time of war, what’s the objective of propaganda?

The first is to rally your own population. The second is to persuade allies that you’re doing the right thing: to make friends friendlier, to make allies more supportive, and maybe even create a few new allies. And the third is to demoralize your enemy.

Some people would call that psychological warfare: to break your enemy’s will to resist, to protect images of your strength that are so overwhelming that the enemy hastens to surrender or to compromise. And that’s also a very old element in communication in wartime.

What are some past examples of wartime propaganda in the United States?

President Wilson in the First World War spoke about a war to end all wars, a war to make the world safe for democracy. He had his 14 points for how the diplomatic scene was going to be reformed. On the eve of World War II, President Roosevelt spoke about the four freedoms and set out a whole vision for a new international order. President H.W. Bush talked about a war to protect a new order on the eve of the war with Iraq.

There’s always been a chaotic, violent kind of message around American war, and sometimes this occurs in popular culture. One example would be the song “Barbara Ann,” which was made famous by the Beach Boys. It was recorded in a parody version by a group called Vince Vance & the Valiants in 1980 and they did a version called Bomb Iran. It had lines like…

“Went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks, Tell the Ayatollah, “Gonna put you in a box.”

President Trump brought the song back last year and used it as the soundtrack in a White House video celebrating the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites.

Is the propaganda different this time?

What we’re seeing from the Trump White House are videos that integrate footage from video games with clips from Hollywood movies and with great declarations of kaboom. There’s even one with SpongeBob.

And all of this plays into an idea that war can be communicated through memes and clips from games. It’s a meme-ification of war, a gamification of war, an appeal to war-like images that are bizarrely taken out of context.

Who are these videos for and why would the White House not aim at the broadest part of the population?

I see these videos as having been created by young men, for young men. They’re full of references to the culture of young men, including game culture, including war-oriented video games and references that other people just wouldn’t get.

They’re articulating a visual and cultural language specific to a generation. It has a propaganda purpose, but it’s not a purpose that is focused on a wider section of the American public. And I think that the president has no interest in people who weren’t planning to vote for him.

Who benefits the most from these videos?

China, because it makes the Chinese look like the adults in the diplomatic room just by doing nothing. China will have tremendous appeal to the countries of the Global South, even to former partners of the United States in Europe who are appalled by this kind of unpredictable messaging and unpredictable behavior that goes along with it.

Mogging, -maxxing, and Clavicular, briefly explained

2026-02-20T16:00:46-05:00

The popular online "looksmaxxing" trend promotes unproven and often dangerous techniques to boost sexual appeal; in this illustration, taking a hammer to your face. | Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

Do you remember where you were when Clavicular got brutally framemogged by an ASU fraternity leader?

Or maybe you saw the clips of the 20-year-old creator — alongside Andrew Tate and white nationalist Nick Fuentes — dancing to Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” at a Miami nightclub.

Or maybe you have no idea what any of this means.

The internet subculture known as looksmaxxing, has recently jumped from obscure message boards into the mainstream — thanks in part to a 20-year-old creator who goes by Clavicular.

Clavicular’s real name is Braden Peters. And he’s not just posting about skincare routines or plastic surgery. Peters recently weighed in on the 2028 presidential election, arguing that if the race were between California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President JD Vance, Newsom would win for one simple reason: He’s more attractive.

To understand how appearance, politics, and online extremism are brewing in this corner of the internet, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Atlantic staff writer and host of the podcast Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full episode wherever you get podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Who is Clavicular?

Clavicular is a young man — he’s in his 20s. He started posting on the internet as a teenager, around when he was about 15 years old, on these looksmaxxing forums, which are forums that are dedicated to making yourself as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible through body modification.

Clavicular basically toiled in obscurity for a really long time until he allegedly hit someone with his Cybertruck while he was live streaming on Christmas Eve of this past year.

Who are the looksmaxxers?

The looksmaxxers are complicated because they overlap with lots of other communities online. There’s the involuntarily celibate community, known as incels, that have links to violent extremism. But really there’s this core feeling in looksmaxxing that the only thing that matters in all of life is how good you look, that that is tied to your self-worth in every way, and that what you should be doing is trying by all means necessary — whether that is breaking bones in your body, whether that is chewing on a rubber ball for hours a day — to get your jawline to be straighter. To get a leg up, you need to do that because the best thing that you can do is go out in the world and look better than everyone else and document the heck out of it.

What do we know about what Clavicular has done to himself?

He has said on various podcasts, etc., that he has smashed his face with a hammer. The theory there is that when your bones break, they grow back stronger.

And so he has smashed his face, his jawline, in order to strengthen it to make it look better. He started, according to him, taking testosterone when he was around 14 or 15 years old in order to speed up his puberty and get his body looking like an adult. He’s said he’s taken methamphetamines in order to hollow out his cheeks.

The looksmaxxers have their own language, which I find very compelling. Can you define a couple of the terms?

“These guys are extremely effective attention hijackers, and that is important.”

Mogging is looking better than someone looking hot. And actually what I found is it’s a sort of an acronym, but it stands for alpha male of the group, [shortened to] male of the group — MOG.

There’s all kinds of words that they’re just making up on the spot too, like jestermaxxing, which is being jocular, jovial, having fun.

What is the objective of being hot? What is the purpose of all this?

It is social dominance really, or just dominance in general. This idea of mogging comes from this alpha male of group acronym: The “alpha” part of that, and the “male” part of that are both extremely important. And so going out in public as an extremely hot person is not just to show how beautiful you are, but it’s to be dominant over other people. You want to make other people look bad. You want them to feel bad about themselves based on how unbelievably attractive you are, and you also want to basically conquer women.

I’ve read your pieces and I listened to your podcast and there’s a thing that I think you both say directly and kind of dance around, which is…this seems stupid, but it isn’t actually stupid. Explain what you mean.

I think it’s stupid on the content level. It’s lacking in substance is how I would put it. There’s the clip of Clavicular, I believe he’s in Miami. He’s with this streamer, Sneako, who’s very popular, and Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist Groyper leader, also a streamer. And they are in a living room somewhere in an apartment and having a conversation that is incredibly stilted, just incredibly vapid. There’s just not a lot being exchanged there.

Clavicular seems to react like he is one of those wind-up dolls. You pull the string and there’s like five different reactions. So one of them’s like, “Hey dude, that’s so based, sick.” And so on the substance level, there’s that.

Then there’s the element of what he means, what that vapid content means, what the popularity of someone like Clavicular means. And I think that that is not stupid. The fact that I’m writing an article about him in The Atlantic because he’s hanging out with these people. The fact that he was able to leverage his popularity into this situation where he is meeting with Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer. Fuentes, who is influential enough that he’s trying to force the MAGA coalition further towards white nationalism. That he’s able to go into a club with these guys and get them to play the Ye song, “Heil Hitler,” and turn that into this viral moment that then gets the mayor of Miami to have to react to it, to condemn it, to basically apologize on behalf of the city for letting this happen. These guys are extremely effective attention hijackers, and that is important.

The “boys club” that protected Epstein

2026-02-06T15:54:17-05:00

The DOJ’s rollout of more than 3 million files tied to Jeffrey Epstein has been chaotic. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

The Department of Justice has released more than 3 million files tied to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. The rollout has been chaotic.

Many documents were heavily redacted, while others appeared to expose victims’ personal information and photos that were not supposed to be public.

Officials say this is the full set of materials that will be made public and that additional criminal charges are unlikely. So now that the files are out: What have we actually learned, and will anyone be held accountable?

To find out, Today, Explained guest host Jonquilyn Hill spoke with Business Insider reporter Maddie Berg, who covers wealth and power.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

View Link

What have we learned from this latest document dump?

I think the overarching thing I’ve really taken away is it’s a really rare look about how rich and powerful people — mainly men — communicate, how the network works, how they do favors for each other.

And they talk about women in a way that is really scary. That’s kind of the overarching theme I’ve taken away, is how permissive this rich and powerful class has been or was to Epstein.

Additionally, there have been revelations about figures. People like Elon Musk, who have said: I have cut ties with Epstein, I didn’t know him, I never went to the island, etc., but we’re seeing that he was emailing Epstein, asking for an invite to the island to go to a “wild” party.

We’re seeing Howard Lutnick. He said he cut ties with Epstein in 2005, but their emails, which indicate he seemingly went to Epstein’s Island in 2012.

We’re seeing Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, the law firm, step down overnight as chairman. He’s still working as a lawyer there.

There’s a lot of Woody Allen/Epstein overlap in this. He actually helped Woody Allen’s daughter, one of them, get into Bard College, it seems like. So again, there’s so much overlap in terms of who you think of as kind of creepy men.

Who are other powerful people mentioned in the files?

The man formerly known as Prince Andrew has been connected to Epstein for years. In these emails, the evidence seems like sex trafficking. It seems like him asking Epstein to be set up with women.

Additionally, we’re seeing Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s ex-wife. Prince spoke to Epstein in a very friendly way. Same with the Crown Princess of Norway — and this is all, by the way, after 2008, when he was convicted of prostitution with a minor.

We’re also seeing Peter Mandelson. He was the former British ambassador to the US. He resigned from his position in the House of Lords, and we’re seeing fallout for that. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK, is under fire at the moment because he apparently knew about some of Peter Mandelson’s ties to Epstein when Starmer named him ambassador.

We’ve seen more repercussions to foreign leaders than to Americans. Why do you think that is?

A lot of the leaders in America, the names that are jumping out are business leaders. We’re kind of going to see how that plays out.

We’re seeing the NFL is looking into Steve Tisch, the owner of the Giants. We’re going to really kind of see how the pieces fall as we learn more and more.

“I found it interesting how much these people put into writing. It was almost like they believed they were above the law or above repercussion.”

I also think that, repercussions-wise, the whole point of the document dump is not to find new evidence. It’s for the Department of Justice to prove that it did not leave any stone unturned. It looked into everybody. It thought about prosecuting these people. It went down those rabbit holes. It couldn’t find enough to criminally prosecute anyone else other than Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein.

Some of these correspondents might be creepy, it might be sleazy, it might be gross, it might be unethical; but there wasn’t enough criminal goods in this to prosecute anyone else named.

What do consequences look like if they’re not criminal charges?

I think a lot of it is up to the public, if we’re not okay with something that we read in this, whether it’s from a politician or a business leader, to really push back and to say, This is not okay. We want this leader out. We want them out of government, out of their business, whatever it is. It’s kind of up to the court of public opinion.

Now, that said, we are going to see some of these people testifying in front of Congress later this month. The Clintons are going to testify. Les Wexner, who was listed in a draft document by the DOJ as a co-conspirator or potential co-conspirator of Epstein’s, will too. So we are going to see these people questioned by the government.

We might get more answers, and we might then, it won’t be criminal charges necessarily, but we might get repercussions from the public, and there might be more consequences in that way.

What should the public take away from all of this whole thing?

I think it’s important to understand how the very, very, very wealthy, the very, very powerful interact with each other. How they speak about women, how they use each other.

And also how many people can’t be taken at their word. So many people denied having a connection to Epstein or visiting his island or talking to him after his conviction in 2008, but they were lying. And I think it’s really important that we hold people to account, and we don’t take their word at face value.

I found it interesting how much these people put into writing. It was almost like they believed they were above the law or above repercussion. And not everybody, obviously, but some very rich and powerful people think they’re immune to consequences. And it’s really up to the public now that this is out there, what consequences they face.

The strategy Europe used to save Greenland from Trump

2026-01-23T17:38:18-05:00

People bear Greenlandic flags as they march to protest against President Donald Trump and his announced intent to acquire Greenland on January 17, 2026 in Nuuk, Greenland. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

And just like, the Greenland crisis seems to have been defused.

It was a crisis of President Donald Trump’s own making. After broaching the idea of the United States taking Greenland a year ago, Trump ramped up his rhetoric in recent weeks, culminating with the threat of tariffs against Europe and the specter of military action and the dissolution of NATO if the US didn’t get what it wanted.

But this week, after speaking before world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump announced that he and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had reached a framework of a deal over Greenland’s future — one that did not include US ownership of the island.

The announcement was widely seen as a comedown for Trump. So why did he back down?

To answer the question, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Henry Farrell, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Farrell recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Europe Has a Bazooka. Time to Use It.” In the piece, he argues that Europe had been too timid in pushing back against Trump’s threats, and that it needed a more forceful posture, one grounded in “deterrence theory.” According to reports, that’s what Europe’s leaders showed at Davos this week — and it may well explain Trump’s retreat on Greenland.

It’s been roughly 80 years since the last World War, which means we’ve been doing something right, all of us. How do big powers deter attacks from other big powers?

So I think that you really want to start with the nuclear age and the nuclear era, and you even want to start with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was a moment when the United States and the USSR scared the hell out of each other because it was very close to a situation in which we would’ve actually had a nuclear war and possibly the extinction of humanity.

So after that, we began to see the development of a set of concepts, a set of ideas, which really tried to figure out, how can you work through the situation of nuclear crisis, the risk of nuclear armageddon, the fact the United States and the USSR have fundamentally different political interests, and how can you actually get to a place of stability?

So you begin to get the development of all of these ideas by people such as Thomas Shelling, who won a Nobel Prize for economics. He’s a game theorist who begins to work out, how do you deter? How do you in a sense use the fact that you have nuclear weapons as something that people will pay attention to without ever actually having to use them.

You want to make it so that you don’t have to use a nuclear weapon. How?

The key example, which I think shows some of the brutality in a certain sense of this way of thinking that Shelling offers, is troops in West Berlin during the Cold War. The idea behind this was that, as Schelling describes these people, these soldiers, their job in a certain sense was to, as he said it bluntly, their job is to die.

And so what the calculus is, is that if you have these soldiers there, these soldiers are in a sense not going to be able to defend the city particularly well, but they will die or be captured if the city is in fact attacked by the Soviet Union. If that happens, then any president is not going to want to be able to stand over the fact that thousands of troops have been captured and killed.

This is likely to lead to further escalation, and Shelling’s argument is that this risk of further escalation and the possibility, maybe a 10 percent possibility, that this might actually lead to nuclear war, is sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from attacking.

Nobody is threatening anybody with a nuclear weapon, but Donald Trump is making some statements that very clearly make Europe very nervous. Where do we see deterrence theory operating now, today?

First of all, we see these eight European countries who send a small military force for a brief period of exercises to Greenland. What they’re doing here is they’re setting up a trip wire, which is like a less powerful version of what the United States did with West Berlin. So really what they’re doing here is they are saying effectively to Trump that if Trump actually goes ahead and invades Greenland, that there are going to be eight other NATO allies who are willing to be on Greenland’s and Denmark’s side if this happens.

That is one of the reasons plausibly why Trump goes from these saber-rattling threats where he suggests that he is indeed going to invade Greenland, [then] moves instead to economic measures of one sort or another. In particular, these tariffs. He imposes tariffs against these eight European countries in order to punish them for what they do.

And then that leaves a second set of questions for Europe, which is, how do they respond to that? And they have this very weird, very complicated, very awkward legislative mechanism called the anti-coercion instrument, which possibly serves as a very imperfect trip wire. And that is more or less where the argument goes.

How does that serve as an economic trip wire?

This is a legal instrument that the European Union brought into being, which allows them to retaliate in a wide variety of ways. It’s one of these very vague seeming instruments, which allows the EU legally to retaliate against economic coercion by, for example, blocking investments by taking away intellectual property, by imposing import or export restrictions. It’s very, very open-ended.

It sounds like the European Union did not have to use the economic bazooka but Trump backed down anyway. Why?

[There’s] some interesting clues as to what is happening, which come from some of the statements of the people who were at Davos representing Trump before he got there. Over a period of two days, [there’s] a huge difference in the ways that they’re talking about the problem.

So it begins with [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent being quite insulting to Europe, more or less saying, “Well, yeah, so they’re just going to mount some kind of a committee of inquiry or words that affect sort of, let’s see how far that gets.” In other words, completely dismissing the possibility that Europe can do anything which is effective. And then a few hours later, he is saying that Europeans really shouldn’t escalate. We really don’t want you to escalate; please don’t escalate, don’t escalate, don’t escalate, don’t escalate.

And so that suggests that he has been having conversations in between the first statement and the second where clearly there has been some real sense that there is a coalition which is engaging against this measure, and that coalition is sufficiently credible that the United States has something to worry about.

So it really does look like a climbdown disguised as a declaration of enormous victory. The fact that this is happening through Rutte and through NATO rather than, for example, through direct negotiations with Denmark, suggests that what is going to happen is that we’re going to get some kind of agreement on security in the Arctic region, which everybody is more or less on the same page on and Trump will declare this a glorious victory over Greenland and then move on.

Can Congress stop Trump from trying to take Greenland?

2026-01-16T17:04:46-05:00

Protesters with Greenland flags gather for a protest titled “Greenland Belongs to the Greenlanders” outside the US Embassy on January 14, 2026 in Copenhagen, Denmark. | Martin Sylvest Andersen/Getty Images

Since the United States announced it would “run” Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration has openly floated similar interventions elsewhere in Latin America.

But the country Donald Trump has fixated on most isn’t an adversary — it’s an ally. Greenland, a NATO member and longtime partner of the United States has repeatedly found itself in the president’s crosshairs.

These threats, delivered largely through unilateral executive action, have once again raised questions about Congress’s role as a check on presidential power. And with Trump in his final term, even some Republicans are showing small but notable signs of concern.

Today, Explained co-host Astead Herndon spoke with Annie Grayer, a senior reporter at CNN, about how Capitol Hill is responding — and where those fractures inside the GOP may be heading.

Do we expect more Republicans breaking more with Trump to change now that it’s 2026 and not 2025?

Well, certainly Republicans know it’s an election year. The spotlight is on them, and I think we’re starting to see some openings for cracks. But I put so many caveats there because whenever we think there could be an opening for a real Republican split, as we saw play out on the Hill with the war powers vote, Trump and his team are really good at keeping Republicans in line through a public and private pressure campaign.

But his ability to do that is going to get increasingly more difficult as Republicans start campaigning and have to figure out how to run on what Republicans in Congress have done so far. There are a lot of moderates who are looking at the calendar, looking at what’s coming in 2026 and know that they have to carve out their own lane here.

Trump’s foreign interventionism definitely seems like the latest flash point in the GOP relationship with him. We did see five Republicans break with the White House and support that war powers resolution. What changed?

A lot of Republicans were publicly saying, I fully support how this operation went down and that this does not need an intervention from Congress. Clearly behind the scenes there were five Republican senators who felt very strongly this actually does require an act of Congress and congressional intervention. What we saw play out is Trump’s true pressure campaign and what it means to be a Republican in Donald Trump’s party.

Immediately after the vote, Trump took to Truth Social and name-checked all five of those Republicans and said they should not be elected to Congress again. These are members of his own party. Now, some of these Republican senators are in opposition to Trump, like Sens. Rand Paul, Lisa Murkowski or Susan Collins, but Todd Young and Josh Hawley — that really took the president and his team by surprise. So those were the two that they focused on, thinking that they were going to be the ones they could peel off.

But what we saw here was the role that Secretary Rubio played, who’s a former senator, who has personal relationships with all of these individuals and was able to sit with these senators, give them more information and give them assurances on their red line. Both Todd Young and Josh Hawley said that their red line was they did not want boots on the ground in Venezuela.

So Republicans did get something out of it. But you can ask yourself what really changed, and it really is the full-court press that these Republicans received from Trump and his team.

What have Republican members in Congress been saying about the military use of force in Greenland?

So Greenland, we are seeing an even bigger break potentially than what we saw with Venezuela and from a cast of characters that aren’t the usual critics of Trump.

Republican senators specifically are sort of like, what are we doing here with Greenland? Certainly people are not on board with military force: the speaker of the House, the leader of the Republican Senate, have said military action in Greenland would not be a good idea.

And then even when it comes to the purchase of Greenland, you have the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who came out of a meeting with Danish officials and said, we should not be talking about the purchase of Greenland. That’s not what these officials want.

And there’s a lot of Republicans, even more so privately who I’m talking to who are kind of hoping that Trump isn’t serious about this. And so I think Republicans are trying to not get ahead of where the president is here. They don’t want to draw a firm line until they see exactly what Trump is going to do. But there is this sort of trepidation in this sort of, I don’t know, maybe even quiet finger crossing that Trump is going to drop this, he’s going to move on, and that what he’s saying about Greenland isn’t actually going to come to fruition.

Is there any kind of willingness for Congress to reign in that power right now, if we think even beyond the war powers resolution? How much is there discussion of Congress’s own role? How much are members talking about that?

It’s a huge topic of conversation.I think that’s why the war powers resolution votes were such a big deal because this question is front and center for both Democrats and Republicans. This is no longer a partisan question, but this is about protecting the institution of Congress, the legislative branch, and when it comes to the foreign intervention.

More specifically, when I’ve been asking this question to Republicans, they are pointing to a number of examples in recent history that show that the degradation of Congress, specifically when it comes to war powers, has been happening for a long time. If you go back to Obama and the bombing of Libya and going into Pakistan to get Osama bin Laden, those were things that happened without congressional approval.

And so yes, what’s happening right now is putting a real spotlight on the issue. But I think for people to really understand this, we have to go way back. This is something that Congress has sort of been ceding power bit by bit, and it finds us in this potential crisis that we’re in now.

And I think the real question that I continue to ask in my reporting, and I still don’t find an answer to, is what is going to be the red line that gets people to actually say, okay, enough is enough.

How Trump brought the World Cup to America

2026-01-07T09:30:34-05:00

President Donald Trump receives the FIFA Peace Prize from FIFA President Gianni Infantino during the draw for the 2026 FIFA Football World Cup. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

This year, North America will host the world’s largest sporting event: the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be played in 11 cities in the United States, three in Mexico, and two in Canada.

The World Cup is the most-watched sporting event on the planet, drawing more viewers than the Super Bowl and the World Series combined. This year marks the first time since 1994 that World Cup matches will be played in the United States.

This year’s edition has also gotten attention for political reasons. The US role in hosting the tournament has been years in the making, and it’s closely tied to President Donald Trump and his unusually warm relationship with FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

Infantino has praised Trump lavishly, presenting him with gifts — including FIFA’s Peace Prize, a wholly made-up award that the FIFA president gave to Trump last November — and has reportedly visited the White House more than any other world leader during Trump’s second term.

Today, Explained co-host Astead Herndon spoke with Adam Crafton, a senior reporter at The Athletic, who has closely covered FIFA and the growing relationship between the two men.

How did the US, Canada, and Mexico even get these games in the first place?

The way it works is nations bid, and they bid quite a long way out. The process for this was around 2017. It was actually during Trump’s first presidency.

It’s interesting to look back on, because President Trump gets the opportunity to take credit for it. But actually, one of the motivating factors for [the US, Canada, and Mexico] joining forces was kind of this concern about whether America, the USA, could win a bid by itself, because this was coming off the back of, if you remember, the FBI’s criminal investigations into FIFA and the DOJs involvement. And there was this concern about whether FIFA membership would actually go for it, just an American bid. So [the US] joined forces with Canada and Mexico.

Also, just this feeling at the time of Trump saying some pretty disparaging things about other parts of the world. During the bidding process, I spoke to people part of that bid, and they would be going round saying to people things like, “Oh, you know, Trump doesn’t really mean what he’s saying,” or “Don’t worry, he won’t be the president by the time this comes around.” And yet, here we are. And Trump, I think Trump likes it, basically, because he can claim credit. He can say, “I was here when we won this. I brought this, and now I’m here to deliver this.”

We have our two main characters here: President Trump and Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA. Can you tell me about their relationship and how it’s shaping the World Cup?

Their relationship was born out of the bid. Infantino kind of got himself into the Oval Office a couple of times; that was how it started. But what actually happened was, whereas a lot of people obviously turned on Trump towards the end of his first presidency and certainly after January 6, Infantino didn’t. There was no point where Infantino publicly distanced himself from Trump. He stayed close. He went to Mar-a-Lago. He maintained that relationship. And I think Trump, whatever people think of him, he’s clearly someone who remembers those who are loyal to him.

“Infantino has praised Trump lavishly…and has reportedly visited the White House more than any other world leader during Trump’s second term.”

When Trump was then out of office, FIFA found it really difficult to penetrate the White House. There was no picture with Joe Biden in the Oval Office. There was no visit to the Oval Office for Infantino during that time. Then, when Trump wins power in November 2024, Infantino is immediately on the front foot — I mean, on Instagram every other day, praising Trump. He went to his pre-inauguration rally. And Trump would keep name-checking him at these events. It was pretty odd for those of us who have followed Infantino as a job, kind of this soccer bureaucrat, to all of a sudden see him basically being on first name terms with the US president.

Infantino’s been in the Oval Office more than any foreign state leader, for example. That’s extraordinary.

Wait, say that again? He’s been in the Oval Office more than any other foreign state leader, any other kind of dignitary?

Yeah, I mean, if you think of, at least, in public appearances, where you see those kind of joint Oval Office affairs, like the one that, for example, Mamdani had with Trump in the Oval Office. There’s been several of those with Trump and Infantino.

Can you explain the FIFA Peace Prize?

So, at the FIFA World Cup draw, at the start of December, Donald Trump was presented with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize.

FIFA has never had a Peace Prize. Nobody has ever asked FIFA to do a peace prize, as far as we know. And the background of this is earlier, in Autumn 2025, there was a kind of unofficial campaign coming out of the White House to suggest that President Trump should be winning the Nobel Peace Prize. And actually, the day before the Nobel Peace Prize was announced, Infantino goes out on Instagram and actually says President Trump deserves it.

I mean, there’s no reason for the president of FIFA to be making these declarations about who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Why is Infantino going out on a limb in this way?

There’s a few theories on this. The first is, just: Infantino loves it, right? He loves being around rich, powerful people — sees himself as this kind of head of state for soccer.

The second view is there is a pragmatic need for FIFA to go above and beyondd. And maybe they just think, “This is what we need to do to make sure we get what we need.” And there are things that FIFA needs. So, the host cities, the 11 host cities in the states, have needed $625 million worth of federal security funding for the tournament.

Recently, and amid all the immigration policies that have been going on, FIFA secured what has been called a “FIFA pass,” which means that, if you have bought a ticket for the World Cup, you will get an appointment wherever you are in the world through a visa interview in your country within six to eight weeks.

There are these concessions that FIFA have got, but at the same time, you now have four nations — Haiti, Iran, Senegal, Ivory Coast — whose countries have travel bans, which mean their fans can’t travel to the tournament.

So, there’s some wins and there’s some losses, but I think FIFA are wary [that], at some point, someone in the White House might turn around, look at FIFA and say, “Hang on. They are a kind of a global organization that get tax breaks from America, that get all this revenue from putting on a tournament on our soil, and we are not getting a cut of the ticket revenue, of the parking revenue, of the broadcast, the sponsorship. Why are we helping these guys so much?” Does a Peace Prize go some way to just making sure that’s always on [Trump’s] desk and reminding him FIFA’s great?