LOS ANGELES — Since Donald Trump has returned to the White House, Olympics, LA 28 and FIFA officials have lavished the president with praise, attention and gifts, and contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign war chests of the Republican Party and Trump’s political allies amid rising concerns that Trump could seriously undermine the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games or even prevent the two most watched events on planet from even taking place.
LA 28 chairman Casey Wasserman even made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach estate, in January, just days before the inauguration. FIFA president Gianni Infantino brought along the World Cup trophy on a visit to the Oval Office.
Only the “winners” are allowed to hold it, Infantino told Trump as he handed the trophy to the president.
Yet the fawning has not prevented Trump from threatening to move the Olympic Games out of Los Angeles and relocate World Cup matches from Blue State strongholds such as the Boston area, Seattle and the Bay Area.
“If I thought LA was not going to be prepared properly, I would move it to another location,” Trump told reporters earlier this month. “(California governor) Gavin Newsom, he’s got to get his act together.”
Trump cannot legally remove the Olympic Games from Los Angeles but the administration’s control over federal funding and visas could be used as leverage against Olympic and World Cup organizers to extract concessions that could threaten the integrity and success of the global events, according to current and former IOC members, Olympic historians and experts and current and former Los Angeles city and county officials told the Southern California News Group, and according to contracts and other documents related to the Olympics and World Cup.
“He’s the president of the United States and that’s the host nation, so you have to pay some attention to him,” said Dick Pound, a former IOC vice president from Canada. “But he does not own the Games, notwithstanding creating himself as chairman of whatever that committee is, the task force. He’s not in charge of the Games. The IOC would have to consent to any change. Not only the venues but the Olympic city. “
“There are a number of ways he can gum up the works,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a long-time Los Angeles County board of supervisors member who was on the Los Angeles city council during the 1984 Olympic Games.
When asked if Trump could move the Summer Games out of Los Angeles, Penn State professor Mark S. Dyreson said, “Well, in a technical sense, no. The IOC controls the hosting of the Olympic Games. But he’s got a lot of power to make things miserable for the IOC if he wants to.
“He could just bar athletes from outside the U.S. from coming into the U.S. so it wouldn’t be much of an Olympics,” continued Dyreson, author of “Crafting Patriotism for Global Domination: America at the Olympic Games. “So I’m sure the IOC is pulling their hair out, wondering what’s going to happen.
“That image of him grabbing the World Cup trophy is scaring a lot of people.”
A trepidation toward Trump, if not outright fear, is evident in the hallways of FIFA and IOC’s Zurich and Lausanne headquarters and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s Colorado Springs offices.
IOC, FIFA, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic and LA 28 officials, concerned about upsetting the president and his staff, have gone to great lengths to avoid or not directly answer questions about the potential Trump impact on Los Angeles hosting its third Olympic Games and the World Cup, newly expanded to 48 teams and played in 11 U.S. cities including Inglewood and Santa Clara as well as venues to Canada and Mexico.
IOC vice president Nicole Hoevertsz, who is overseeing Los Angeles’ preparations for the Games, referred questions about Trump to an IOC spokesperson who issued a statement on behalf of the organization: “The Olympic Games LA28 have the full support of the President of the United States, the Governor of California and the Mayor of Los Angeles. All of them are being extremely helpful in the preparations for these Games. This is mirrored on the operational level of the administration. There are three years to go, and we are confident that LA28 will be a great Olympic Games.”
The USOPC declined comment for this story.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, writing in an email, “Please remember this could have been avoided if the Democrats voted for the clean Continuing Resolution to keep the government open.”
“I try and keep really focused on doing our job,” Wasserman said during a recent conference at USC. “I try not to get caught up in the noise, because if you get caught in the noise, I think you lose your way a little bit.”
But it’s hard to tune out the noise when Trump continues to make statements threatening to send federal troops to Los Angeles during the Games, relocate the Games and move World Cup matches.
“We’ll do anything necessary to keep the Olympics safe, including using our National Guard or military,” Trump said during an August 5 ceremony in which he signed an executive order creating a federal task force on the Olympics, which he will head. Trump also created a federal task force for the World Cup in May. He will serve as the chairman of the World Cup task force as well.
During the August ceremony, which was attended by Wasserman and Gene Sykes, the USOPC chairman and an IOC member, Trump referred to Mayor Karen Bass as “not very competent.”
“I think it’s part of the theater that is part of the Trump administration, unfortunately, and I just think we have to go about our business putting on the finest summer Games that the world has ever seen,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Los Angeles City Council president and chairman of the council’s ad hoc committee on the Olympics, said in an interview with SCNG.
“Unfortunately, it causes a lot of insecurity and anxiety among our residents and businesses, especially. We’ve got businesses that are preparing and have been preparing for years to do business with the Olympics, with FIFA. So when you get a statement like that, obviously they get worried that perhaps their investment can be invalidated by the whims of one individual. But in terms of individuals on the city side doing the work, we continue to press ahead.
“My read on all of this, and it’s impossible to read the minds of people in the Trump administration, but all of this to me is just slow drip fascism. I think he’s trying to get the country to adjust to fascism. And if you study the history of fascism, this is what leaders do. That is what I see happening . Fortunately for all of us, not just for Angelenos, we see a great deal of resistance to that, whether it’s Chicago, Portland, here and Los Angeles and beyond, I think this will go on for some time.”
Some of that anxiety was also visible during the Los Angeles City Council’s ad hoc Olympic committee meeting on Wednesday.
“The president wants these Games to succeed,” LA 28 CEO Reynold N. Hoover said during the meeting.
“I think the administration is committed to a great Games, and I think, you know, as I’ve said before and said to members of Congress, there’s no better place than the city of LA to host the Games, and nobody else can do it to this size,” Hoover said later in a brief interview with SCNG.
But city council member Bob Blumenfield did not appear to share Hoover’s confidence in Trump.
“What I’m concerned about is, while they’re being cooperative now, at some point, they’re going to do what they’ve done with funding to universities and others, and they’re going to create a condition that we cannot meet,” Blumenfield told Hoover and LA 28 chief operating officer John Harper. “You know, they’re going to have a social issue, they’re going to trans issues or immigration issues or something like that. They have a history of doing (that) and make our money contingent or our security contingent on such a policy. What protections do we have in place to protect us against that kind of last-minute extortion?”
“What I can tell you is that up to this point, no one in the federal government, no one in the White House, and no one at the departments of agencies that we’ve met with has put a condition on any support for the Games,” Hoover responded. “I’ve spoken directly with FEMA leadership on the money, the billion dollars, and there are no conditions attached to those dollars.
“What the administration will do later?” Hoover continued, “I wouldn’t sit here and say or predict what they will do.”
Blumenfield was unmoved.
“You may be prepared,” he said. “I don’t trust this President to not do that. And yeah, so just just, we don’t need to vet a strategy here, but just please be vetting strategies about contingencies and ways we can protect ourselves.”
The Olympic Games are projected to generate $6.88 billion in revenue. Hoover said LA 28 has already secured $1.7 billion of its targeted goal of $2.5 billion in sponsorship revenue.
The World Cup will generate $8.9 billion in revenue, according to FIFA projections. The eight matches played at SoFi Stadium are projected to have a $594 billion economic impact on the Southern California market and generate $34.9 million in tax revenue within Los Angeles County, according to a study by an economic research and consulting firm commissioned by the Los Angeles World Cup host committee.
Those revenues would be greatly reduced if LA 28 or local organizing committees had to fully cover the cost of providing security for those events. Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act set aside $1 billion in federal funding for security at the 2028 Olympics.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced this week it was allocating $625 million in security funding to the 11 U.S. World Cup host cities.
“We can’t hide from the fact that you can’t deliver an Olympics without the full engagement of the federal government,” Wasserman said at the USC conference. “Everything we’ve asked them to do, they have done, and they have done so without conditions placed on them. They deserve a ton of credit for delivering and understanding what we need and not placing conditions on it.
“We need to double the size of LA Metro for 30 days and that’s only done with the Department of Transportation. We need the IRS to change tax laws so they don’t tax athletes for winning gold medals.”
Which gives Trump a lot of leverage, current and former IOC members and longtime Olympic and FIFA watchers maintain.
“Trump can really mess up some things, right?” said Holy Cross professor Victor Matheson, co-author of “Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics.” “You know, he really does have a level of power in federal agencies like the State Department that are wildly problematic if the US government were to declare every single person coming in from a variety of World Cup countries to be national security threats. We seem to have given him pretty much carte blanche to do that sort of thing and impose billions of dollars of tariffs. If we’re willing to do that, he certainly has the ability to block soccer players from a bunch of different countries from coming in, which, of course, destroys the tournament. So he’s got that card to play.”
One card Trump can’t play is moving the Games out of Los Angeles, former and current IOC members and Los Angeles city and council officials said.
The Games were awarded to Los Angeles on September 13, 2017, by the IOC in an unprecedented move in which the 2024 Olympics were given to Paris at the same time. The IOC, the City of Los Angeles and LA 28 signed a host city contract in which any moving of venues requires approval of the IOC and the city. An agreement between the city and LA 28 also requires that any venue outside city be approved by the city council.
“LA won the Games fair and square based on our excellent proposal to the International Olympic Committee,” said Janice Hahn, a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors member. “This has been quite literally a decade in the making. The President can’t just move the Games.”
Pound, one of the most influential figures in the Olympic movement in the past 50 years, agreed.
“He can ask for the Games to be canceled because of the perceived civil unrest or whatever the vocabulary will be at the time,” Pound said, referring to Trump. “But he can’t say we’re going to put them in Kansas City. The Games are awarded to a city, and the city and the national Olympic committee and the USOPC have to form an organizing committee for the purpose of making all the necessary arrangements. You can move venues around. You can have an accident in the stadium and it’s no longer fit for the purpose, so you can say we’re going to do the basketball in some other venue. But you’re not at liberty to move the Games around from a city without the consent of the IOC and presumably the USOPC.
“In a sense, one of the things you have to do is separate what he says, because often it’s a very undisciplined series of utterances, and instead look at what he actually does. And that has been somewhat less threatening than all of this. But I mean to say, Los Angeles is too dangerous to hold the Games, frankly, is silly.”
Moving World Cup matches out of Seattle, Santa Clara or Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, would be difficult but not impossible, Matheson said.
For one thing, the U.S. has a wealth of stadiums capable of hosting a World Cup match. The World Cup organizing committee had more than 40 stadiums on its initial list of candidate venues.
“I love the people of Boston. I know the games are sold out, but your mayor is not good,” Trump said when asked recently by reporters if he was serious about moving World Cup matches out of Foxborough, referring to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. “I think she is hurting Boston. The answer is yes: If somebody is doing a bad job, and if I feel there’s unsafe conditions, I would call Gianni, the head of FIFA, who’s phenomenal, and I would say, let’s move it to another location.”
“It probably is possible to move games, certainly FIFA games, it can be done, but it’s expensive, and it’s especially as expensive now because they’ve already started to sell large numbers of tickets, right, right?” Matheson said. “Moving the Olympics out of LA to Dallas would be impossible. So there are some things that are possible and easy, and so you do that to placate Trump, but you got to be careful about whether he’s going to follow through. And, you know, there are some things that are wildly expensive that you can’t just say, ”OK, fine, we’ll move all the games from Boston to, you know, to a city of more of my liking.’
“But the very suggestion that it should be moved (out of Foxborough) for national security reasons is simply untrue. It’s a lie.”
Boston has the lowest murder rate for any major NFL market, according to the most recent FBI statistics.
While Hoover said he and Wasserman have had talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio about a pathway that would make it easier for foreign athletes, officials and other individuals with Olympic-related jobs or duties to enter the U.S., the visa process remains a major concern for Olympic, World Cup and local officials.
“Given what he’s already doing with immigration and the State Department, you could see a scenario where he targets certain countries and just makes it almost impossible for the IOC to be willing to hold an Olympics in the U.S. in 2028,” Dyreson said. “He’s certainly not fond of California, it seems. It would be a huge PR disaster for him, but who knows what his calculations are.”
Trump is hardly the first difficult head of state the IOC and FIFA have had to deal with. And both FIFA and the IOC have been besieged by bribery scandals involving top organization officials and prominent members of local organizing committees.
While Trump cannot legally pull the Games from Los Angeles, under the terms of the host city contract, the IOC is “entitled to terminate the HCC and to withdraw the Games from the Host City, the Host (national Olympic committee) and the (local organizing committee),” although such a move would highly unlikely barring a natural disaster or pandemic.
Among the conditions for removing the Games, “a state of war, civil disorder, boycott, embargo decreed by the international community or in a situation officially recognized as one of belligerence or if the IOC has reasonable grounds to believe that the health or safety of participants in the Games would be seriously threatened or jeopardized for any reason.”
“The whole thing is a total and utter mess at the moment,” Dyreson said. “How much will the IOC bend? Will we be allowed to ban countries which oppose Trump’s policies or he considers enemies? How much will the IOC give up on this notion that it’s supposed to be a global celebration? It’s not free of politics. No one buys that notion. But can he keep out Venezuela or Colombia or Denmark, whoever he’s mad at at the moment? I think it has people’s heads spinning at the moment, and they are hoping for the best but preparing for the worst and how much do you have to placate his ego?”
Ultimately, the card the IOC, LA 28 and FIFA might have is playing to that ego.
“Trump desperately wants to be on TV in front of a billion people, and FIFA says, ‘Well, guess what? You’re not. You’re no longer welcome at this event in any way,’” Matheson said. “That’s a pretty powerful card to play against a president who desperately always wants to be in the center of attention. And this is literally the largest television audience of any single event on the planet in any given four-year period. That’s the World Cup. And of course, the same thing about the Olympics. Trump desperately wants to be a part of those opening ceremonies and the closing ceremonies, and desperately wants to be a star in these sort of things. So again, that’s what, obviously, what the IOC, that’s their card to play again, the IOC.”
“Would he really not let the Olympics come to the United States?” Dyerson said, “Because it’s going to be such a grand stage for him to prance around on. I can’t believe his ego would let him kill it.”
Said Yaroslavsky, Trump “craves attention. He craves to convince everyone that he’s in charge of everything. He just wants to be the center of attention.”
And that’s where Infantino and Wasserman have placed Trump.
At the ceremony announcing the Olympic task force, Wasserman presented Trump with a complete set of medals from the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
“Your support and the entire administration’s support through this entire process has truly been extraordinary,” Wasserman told Trump during the ceremony.
Wasserman referred to a December 2016 meeting with Trump, shortly after his election and nine months before IOC election that resulted in the 2028 Games being award to Los Angeles.
“You’ve been supportive and helpful every step of the way,” Wasserman said, “and we wouldn’t be here without you.”
Trump’s political allies haven’t just received Wasserman’s attention. Wasserman is a longtime and prominent financial backer of Democratic candidates nationwide. Since Los Angeles was awarded the Games in September 2017, he has contributed at least $3.68 million to candidates running for federal office, according to Federal Election Commission records.
But Wasserman has also contributed at least $182,000 to Republican candidates since October 2024. Since Trump’s inauguration, he has contributed $50,000 to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s PAC, $38,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee and $50,000 to the National Republican Senate Committee.
Wasserman also co-hosted with former Paramount Pictures chairwoman Sherry Lansing a September fundraiser for Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who is seen as one of the GOP’s most vulnerable candidates in the 2026 election. Tickets for the event at Lansing’s Bel Air home cost between $3,000 and $10,000.
Infantino’s courtship of Trump has led several publications to describe it as a “Bromance.” The FIFA president invited Trump to hand out medals to the winning players at the summer’s FIFA World Club Cup final. FIFA opened an office in Trump Tower in New York City over the summer. FIFA also switched December’s World Cup draw from the Sphere in Las Vegas to the Kennedy Center in Washington, a move suggested by the Trump administration and first announced by Trump in the Oval Office. Trump will be the guest of honor.
“Some people refer to it as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center,’ but we’re not prepared to do that quite yet,” Trump said. “Maybe in a week or so.”
Infantino has been a frequent guest at the Oval Office. He has met with Trump at least eight times since January, five times in the Oval Office, according to White House records. The president was wearing a red baseball cap that read “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING” when Infantino, during an August Oval Office visit, placed the World Cup trophy in Trump’s hands.
The symbolism of the moment was not lost on IOC and FIFA officials.
“Can I keep it?” Trump asked.
