WITHconsidering that he self-proclaimed hardest worker Donald Trump, who has ever held office, has spent much of the past year sitting idle. In 2025, he influenced sports like no other American politician before him, his visits to stadiums, arenas, golf courses and race tracks so frequent that they began to be perceived as part of the job. But if Trump's presence in the sports arena seems hard to avoid, brace yourself for 2026, when the American presidency no longer simply intersects with sports but threatens to engulf it. The World Cup is upon us, the Olympics are behind us, there's a UFC card on the White House lawn (no joke), and the Commander-in-Chief's well-documented love of jumbotrons is becoming less of a habit and more of an addiction.
Trump's grand sports tour began less than three weeks after his second inauguration, when he became the first sitting president. attend the Super Bowl. A week later he was at the Daytona 500, where Air Force One upon arrival drove along the motorway in front of his armored limousine “The Beast”, walked across the field for a couple of ceremonial circles.
Were NCAA Wrestling Championships in Philadelphia and UFC events in Miami and New Jersey, where his rapturous receptions were covered for days by Fox News; the FIFA Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium, where he remained at the center of Chelsea's trophy risea refusal to give up space that looked less like ignorance of protocol than an animalistic assertion of dominance; Ryder Cup in Bethpage, where his hyper-jingoistic reception foreshadowed the complete collapse of social behavior; a LIV Golf event at his own Doral resort; men's final of the US Open, where the US Tennis Association asked broadcasters to censor protests or reactions to his appearance.
By the time he took the field for the Tigers-Yankees in the Bronx, Lion Commanders in Landover and the Army-Navy Games in Baltimore, it became clear that the President's athletic crawl was not a recreational activity but something more coordinated. Yet nothing could have prepared us for Trump's appearance at the World Cup draw, where he was awarded the FIFA Peace Prize. in a ceremony that dealt the final blow to what was left of the travesty.
Trump is using these appearances the same way politicians once used county fairs and parades: as staged displays of importance intended for cameras and social media. Strikes are rallies taken to their most effective form. Thirty seconds of visibility is enough to saturate the channels, which reflexively increase in size with sports reporters, political reporters, celebrities, both supporters and detractors. The reaction itself is practically irrelevant. Trump is trading in “heat,” an age-old propaganda metric that lumps applause and boos into the same currency. He chooses an arena that suits him, or places where expressions of dissent can be caricatured as elitist and frivolous. Cheering at Nascar or UFC the card flatters his strength. The same purpose is served by ridicule from visitors to tournaments such as the US Open for paying $23 for a vodka soda. None of this seems strange in a country where political coverage has completely absorbed the grammar of Monday Night Football: spectacle over substance, dynamics over substance, constant movement and no reflection.
Sport has long been a favored tool of the powerful, a means of laundering legitimacy, prestige and international authority through spectacle. Even tyrants such as Peisistratus of Athens sponsored athletes and infrastructure to naturalize their rule at the ancient Olympic Games, while Roman emperors from Augustus to Trajan to Commodus linked personal power to public games as a display of power, generosity and divine sanction. This book has proven to last. Mussolini used 1934 World Cup present fascism as disciplined, modern and victorious, and the Italian team organically joined in the propaganda of the regime. Hitler's huge investments in architecture, entertainment and media at the 1936 Berlin Olympics served the same purpose, presenting Nazi Germany as peaceful, developed and legitimate. Franco's acceptance of Real Madrid's European dominance in the 1950s and 60s served as a rehabilitation of soft power after civil war and diplomatic isolation. Mobutu Sese Seko, Mohammed bin Salman, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and many others… the same soup, but in a different bowl.
But as any jaded observer of the Trump ecosystem knows, none of this is really about the crowd. The real business happens behind the scenes, where panelists, promoters, broadcasters and owners mingle in the lightly scented donor sauna. Trump views these events as networking chambers, places where alliances are forged that flatter his vanity and serve his political ambitions in equal measure. (The Rolex complex at the US Open certainly played a role in soft diplomacy: the issue of Swiss tariffs of 39% soon after that it became easierand a gold Rolex later appeared on the Resolute table.)
Grinning photo op with Yankees star Aaron Judge And Walking on YouTube with Bryson DeChambeau to become the content, currency and message of the campaign all at once, assembled with the zeal of a child filling a Panini album. But these are whales like Miriam Adelson, the majority owner of the NBA team Dallas Mavericks, who contributed about $100 million to Trump's re-election campaign and has smartly promised another $250 million if he runs for a third term in 2028 – who really butters their bread.
But behind this theatricality lies something more pragmatic. Sports, in Trump's imagination, are America's great pipeline. And he showed how even fringe sports talk can be turned into political catalysts. During the 2024 campaign he elevated The niche issue of transgender participation in women's sports has become a full-fledged cultural wedge, using it to energize its conservative base and channel broader anxieties about gender and social change into a unified emotional grievance. In an election decided on a knife's edge, it acted much like same-sex marriage did in Bush v. Kerry two decades earlier: not a dominant political issue, but a turnout factor powerful enough to influence the outcome. That strategy continued into his second term, serving as a reminder of how sports can be used as a proxy battleground in America's culture wars.
All of this brings us to the year ahead and the grim realization that 2025 was just a dress rehearsal. In 2026, the United States will host the men's World Cup, a month-long global festival that Trump will seek to use to gain the international recognition he has long craved. He was already vying for the football spotlight thanks to his endless mutual romance with Infantino, the only world sports leader who treats Trump not as a diplomatic inconvenience but as a kind of visiting archangel. Of course, football will take a backseat on Day 4 of the World Cup when Trump celebrates his 80th birthday in the VIP box at the upcoming UFC event. on the South Lawn of the White House.
The truth is that sports, in its current hyper-politicized and hyper-commodified form, fits Trump's needs perfectly. He supplies crowds, cameras, ritual patriotism and ready-made mythologies of strength and struggle. This gives him stadiums and arenas that can be instantly transformed into rallies, and backstage corridors that double as donor gatherings. He offers him a role that he prefers to the one described in the constitution: not the head of the executive branch, but the chief arena.
And so this man will continue to appear, a recurring character in the American sports landscape, impossible to cut from footage, unshakeable by booing, delighted by applause and constitutionally unable to turn down the opportunity to show off on another jumbotron. Sports give Trump everything he wants. Next year he will take even more.
