Why DHS’ post about the USMNT World Cup team is hypocritical

On Friday the United States men’s national soccer team thumped Australia 2-0, thereby advancing to the next stage of the World Cup. Long-suffering American fans, who over the past two decades have endured round-of-16 eliminations (2010, 2014, 2022), a group stage crashout (2006) and even a failure to qualify for the tournament altogether (2018), were ecstatic.

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Apparently, so was the Department of Homeland Security. After the victory, DHS posted an artificial intelligence sloplike image of the U.S.’s starting 11. (Notice the artless insertion of Ricardo Pepi, who played for injured star Christian Pulisic.) The image showed our lads standing in front of a soccer net situated behind a border wall — you know, the wall Mexico paid for. The amateurish tableau read: “Built the Wall.” I don’t know what that means. Maybe DHS didn’t, either, because the message has since been deleted. 

Ninety minutes before kickoff, DHS had posted: “OUR SOIL. Defend the Homeland: One Nation, One Homeland, One Team.” On Saturday, it shared a picture of reserve defender Mark McKenzie leading an after-game prayer with the caption “Psalm 150:6,” a verse often invoked by evangelical athletic ministries.

What were the communications professionals at the scandal-plagued agency up to? Maybe DHS is just owning the libs. Soccer fans in the United States tend to skew young, multicultural, female and generally liberal. The squad has dual nationals, immigrants, the child of a Liberian president and even a birthright citizen (Folarin Balogun, who was Man of the Match in the U.S. victories over Paraguay and Australia). In other words, Team USA offers a full-spectrum representation of the many types of people in this country President Donald Trump and his administration have exhaustively penalized and attacked in one form or another. 

So perhaps DHS was just talking smack, as DHS is wont to do. What better way to talk that smack than by casting the squad’s victory as validating “America First” ideology, immigration enforcement and Christian nationalism to boot? 

Another theory crossed my mind: Could it be that MAGA, or at least a certain rarefied sector of MAGA, is suddenly embracing soccer? In some ways the answer is yes — but certainly not for the reasons we would think. And certainly not for love of the game.  

The American right has traditionally reviled soccer. Since the 1990s, when U.S. teams re-emerged in World Cup tournaments, conservatives have tarred the sport as “communist,” “socialist,” “globalist,” “anti-individualist,” “boring,” unmanly, immoral and un-American.

But now President Donald Trump, not necessarily a Johnny-come-lately to soccer, has entered into a symbiotic relation of grift with FIFA’s controversial president, Gianni Infantino. Perhaps it was Infantino’s experience working with host nations Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022) that led him to the masterstroke of making Trump the inaugural recipient of the FIFA Peace Prize. In the words of analyst David Goldblatt, Infantino understood that “a capricious, self-regarding and vengeful leader is best managed through a mixture of showbiz glad-handing and … obsequious flattery.”