Could you count to a trillion? Oh, hell no.

I just timed myself counting to 100 as fast as I could. It took 38 seconds.

The higher you count, the longer the numbers get, and so the slower the count becomes, but let’s be ridiculously conservative and assume I could maintain that rapid counting pace. Counting to a trillion would then take 380 billion seconds.

That’s 12,050 years.

How high could a person count? Well, for the sake of argument, suppose I commenced counting immediately upon emerging from my mama’s vagina and kept at it for 100 years—before dying abruptly, because I hadn’t eaten, drank, nor slept during those 100 years.

I would have only made it to 8.3 billion.

A trillion is 1,000 billion. It’s an unfathomable number. As the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, if you stack a trillion pennies one atop the other, they’ll stretch to the moon and back—twice.

Back in 2021, I published a book, Jackpot, about runaway wealth in America and its effects on those who come into it, and on society at large. One question that came up a lot was, well, should billionaires exist? Even some of my very wealthy sources felt there should perhaps be some upper limits placed on wealth accumulation.

Should billionaires exist? How quaint. What I can now say with authority is that nobody should have a trillion bucks—ever. It’s entirely absurd. Among the nearly 200 nations on earth, only about 20 have a GDP that big. Simply put, it’s way, way, way too much money for any individual to possess—not to mention that Musk didn’t earn it. We allowed him to accumulate it. That was a choice—a bad one, and also dangerous.

I will elaborate, but first let’s have a little fun.

I did some calculations a while back to demonstrate how egregiously rich the world’s richest guy was—and that was at a time when Musk’s net worth was only $200 billion. Here’s my update:

Suppose we wanted to have a game of Monopoly in which the amount of money each player starts with reflects their relative wealth in real life.

And suppose we want it to be Elon Musk vs. some guy with the average middle-class wealth of $453,300. (Economists define middle class as the 50th through 90th wealth percentiles—the “middle 40″—and this number comes from RealTimeInequality.org.)

So, normally, each player starts a Monopoly game with $1,500. In our rigged version, we want our middle-class player to have at least enough to buy a property or two, so we’ll let him start with $500. How much would Musk then get?

He gets $1.1 billion. (Actually more, since he’s now up to $1.1 trillion, per Forbes, but I’ll stick with $1 trillion for simplicity.)

You couldn’t realistically count that high, either, in your lifetime.

So now we’ve got a problem, because each Monopoly set only comes with $20,580. To play this game requires 53,597 sets, which at today’s low Amazon price of $11.99 will run you $643,162. Our middle-class player couldn’t cover that even if he sold his home and liquidated his other assets.

And also, where would you put the boxes? Each set comes in a box 0.19 cubic feet in volume. All told, they would consume 10,183 cubic feet. Assuming you have standard 9-foot ceilings, they would completely fill a 1,131-square-foot room from floor to ceiling.

Our middle-class player doesn’t have any rooms that big in his house—which he had to sell anyway to cover his half of the cost of the sets.

Suppose you took all Musk’s Monopoly money and spread it out on the ground? Turns out, it would paper over roughly 11 football fields, including the end zones. But as those bills are small and multiple denominations, let’s try this with real-life currency.

If you were to convert Musk’s trillion dollars into $100 bills, we’re talking about 10 billion Franklins. Those bills would paper over 1,112,875,000 square feet—just under 40 square miles—enough to cover Manhattan and then some. Put in World Cup terms, Musk’s wealth would cover 14,480 FIFA-approved soccer pitches with $100 bills. Fields of green, indeed.

Far more important than the physical magnitude of $1 trillion, of course, is the power it musters. With his ridiculous trove, Musk, already unaccountable, becomes even more so. Tax expert Bob Lord—who wrote for Mother Jones in 2024 on the coming of the world’s first trillionaire—had a more recent piece on the rise of American oligarchy and how it has infected our democracy. He wrote:

No person anywhere, in any era, has spent as much to sway election outcomes as Musk, the richest person in history who, according to Open Secrets, shelled out almost $292 million in 2024 helping get Trump and other Republican candidates elected. And that doesn’t count the value of harnessing his X platform to support a twice-impeached, felonious former president who openly promised to make the rich richer—and delivered.

Musk expended 0.1 percent of his wealth in the process and got far more in return. The Trump administration promptly shelved dozens of investigations into Musk’s companies, awarded him billions of dollars in new contracts, and sent his firms’ share prices soaring by placing him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, an unsanctioned body that succeeded wildly—not in eliminating government fraud and waste as promised, but in gutting and disabling federal agencies, including the ones creating headaches for Musk’s companies. 

Lord details policy choices that have enabled wealth to concentrate in an increasingly small number of hands, culminating in the rise of a hyper-privileged few with the undeserved power to sway public affairs in their interests. This oligarchic class, as Northwestern University scholar Jeffrey Winters demonstrates in a powerful recent book excerpt, is untaxable and untouchable. And none so much as the trillionaire Musk.

The oligarchs, as it were, paid off the government’s keeper, and now Musk has scored the winning goal.

It is, alas, an own-goal for America and her democratic experiment.

When Americans tune into UFC Freedom 250, the series of mixed martial arts fights taking over the White House on President Trump’s 80th birthday this Sunday, one key element of the sport will be missing: female fighters.

To the unfamiliar, that might seem unsurprising given the hypermasculine stereotypes that surround MMA. But as Kyle Green, a sociologist who writes on the intersection of sports and politics, recently told me, UFC cards for major events nearly always feature women. In fact, MMA is one of the rare sports in which women appear on the same cards as men and are not subject to different rules. For example, most sports have separate leagues for women; in boxing, women can only fight for a maximum of ten rounds, whereas men’s matches can generally go up to 12. And for more than a decade, the Ultimate Fighting Championship embraced the tradition, with its CEO Dana White touting the inclusion of women as evidence that the organization offers an “even playing field.”

But flexing such feminist bona fides wasn’t always the case, and White admits as much. “I completely own up to saying women would never fight in the octagon,” he said in 2019, referring to his past, staunch opposition to allowing women to fight in the UFC. “But you’ve got to remember at this time, I was trying to get people to accept the men fighting in the Octagon. It wasn’t allowed on pay-per-view. It wasn’t allowed on TV.”

“The reason that the women’s MMA has taken off and it’s so big is because these women are legit,” White continued. “Really good, very technical, and it’s amazing, and I never saw it coming.”

Yet in the days before the White House spectacle, where a hulking claw-like structure has essentially ripped through the South Lawn, White doesn’t appear to prioritize the female fighters he supposedly admires. In fact, when asked about the absence of women, White told Time that he had tried, but “we couldn’t get it done.” The CEO said that he had initially wanted a fight between Zhang Weili and Mackenzie Dern, but according to White, Weili was taking time off. When reached for comment, she did not respond to Time.

It’s a curious rationale coming from one of the most powerful men in sports, and to believe it is to extend White significant latitude, as it belies multiple realities: the UFC’s Rolodex includes many prominent women, ostensibly making it relatively easy to “get it done.” Not to mention the outsized attention given to arguably more extraneous logistics, such as the bathrooms designed to mimic a stay at the “fucking Four Seasons.”

“When the promotion stages its most politically symbolic event ever, and women vanish from the card, that’s not a glitch,” Jenn McClearen, author of Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, said. “It tells you whose presence is considered essential to the story being told on that lawn and whose is optional.”

For Julie Kedzie, a retired mixed martial artist and former UFC fighter, shutting women out of the White House reflects White’s inclination to take on platforms that are “politically expedient for him.” That includes his muted response to the sexism that continues to vex the UFC, despite commanding a singular power to shape the opinions of the political right.

“People still say women can’t fight, that they suck, that when women fight is when they go and get a sandwich,” Kedzie said. “It’s a pervasive attitude that can be proven wrong. But White hasn’t put a stop to that, and he holds the court of public opinion. He has such a lock on the media and could change that story himself by saying, ‘Women can fight, shut the fuck up.’ But he hasn’t.”

Consider what happened with Bud Light. In 2023, after igniting conservative ire with its partnership with trans TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney, the beer partnered with the UFC in an apparent effort to win back the right. It was then that Ben Fowlkes, a sports writer and host of the Co-Main Event podcast, said that White carried out an aggressive campaign to rehabilitate Bud Light’s image. “He essentially provided Anheuser Busch the cover they were looking for, with somebody to go over to the right-wing crowd and tell them, ‘Come back over, you can buy Bud Light again, it’s safe.’ And it worked.”

The sidelining of women at UFC Freedom 250 comes as White insists that he and the UFC are apolitical despite their uncannily close ties to Donald Trump. Even the right-wing, anti-trans, anti-immigrant trash talk widely embraced by some of the organization’s most visible fighters can be traced along the contours of Trump’s political rise.

“Before 2016, it was a rarity to ever hear a fighter who had any political opinions or any political awareness,” Fowlkes said. “Every once in a while, you’d get somebody who had strong feelings, and they were almost always Republican—or anarchist.”

“But fighters just loved Trump. It baffled me because these fighters have worked their whole lives to be able to spot a fake tough guy or a bully. And here’s one, but you love him.”

It’s through the lens of an undeniable rightward shift within the UFC and its fanbase that the absence of women fighting on the White House card can be seen as indicative of the conservative gender ideals held by MAGA: hyperfeminine and reinforcing the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In short: not a fighter. It makes sense, then, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has publicly argued against women in the military, is playing an unusual role in dictating strict physical requirements for military members attending the upcoming White House fight.

The UFC’s defenders are often quick to point to Ronda Rousey, the former UFC champion credited with single-handedly paving the way for women to compete in the UFC, as Exhibit A against such sexist accusations, as well as the MMA’s integrated gender structure.

“It genuinely is remarkable,” McClearen said. “Women in the UFC fight under the same rules, on the same cards, in the same cage as men, and they can headline over men. There’s no asterisk on a women’s fight the way there is in sports where people argue the women’s game is somehow a lesser version.”

But the impetus behind such a progressive structure, McClearen added, was partly business-related.

“The UFC figured out that promoting diverse fighters helps it reach diverse global audiences, so women’s visibility serves the brand,” she said. “Which is empowering and precarious at the same time, because visibility that’s granted for business reasons can be withdrawn for business reasons.”

As for Rousey’s role in reversing White’s fierce resistance to welcoming women in the UFC, Kedzie said, “Her star power was undeniable. She was also a very beautiful woman, and she was going to make [White] a lot of money.”

It isn’t criminal, of course, for the CEO of a major sports organization to prioritize profits. But it’s the nakedly transactional motivations with which White wades into the political that can cause someone to bristle. Take, for instance, White’s “equal playing field” boasts.

“When he says stuff about equality in UFC for men and women, in a sense, yes, it’s true,” Fowlkes said. “But in the sense that they treat them equally badly.”

Kedzie agreed, calling the UFC’s notoriously low fighter pay “poverty wages.”

In one sense, Kedzie said that the absence of women fighting on the South Lawn came as something of a relief. “Not because women can’t be just as fascist as the men,” she said. But ultimately, opting to compete at the White House, with its overwhelming sheen of corruption and disrepute, was a “moral choice.”

“I have absolutely no respect for any fighter that competes on that card,” she noted, “or for anybody who corners somebody who competes on that card.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters, a Guardian analysis shows.

As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to storms, floods, and droughts worsened by the climate crisis.

Of the 39 countries from which the Trump administration has fully or partly restricted entry to the US, 22 are ranked within the most vulnerable quarter of nations in the world to climate impacts, according to a Guardian analysis of data from the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, which assesses how prone jurisdictions are to the climate crisis.

“Nearly all of the most vulnerable countries are on a ban or visa pause,” said Danielle Wood, an associate professor at Notre Dame. Immigrants from Chad and Niger, the two most climate-vulnerable countries in the world according to the index, are now fully barred from the US, as are people from Sudan, Somalia, and Sierra Leone—also among the 10 countries most exposed to climate impacts.

Among the most vulnerable half of countries is Honduras, which has seen stronger rainstorms, droughts, floods, and coastal erosion in recent years. When Hurricane Mitch crashed into the country, killing 7,000 people, one affected family surveyed the unsalvageable ruins of their home and realized they had a lifeline—to move to the United States.

Evelyn, who did not want to share her full name, was a teenager when Mitch hit in 1998 and recalls how her relatives in New York City pleaded with her mother to bring her and her sister to the US.

“There were bodies and dead animals floating in the water, the house was messed up, the furniture was all gone—doors, windows gone. It was so, so sad,” said Evelyn. “I got sick because of the mosquitoes too. My uncle and aunt were just like: ‘OK, just bring the kids over here, don’t stay. It’s dangerous.’”

Storms of the deadly ferocity of Mitch are even more likely today because our atmosphere and oceans have rapidly heated up due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Yet Trump’s curbing of immigration and asylum has made it far harder for people like Evelyn to flee to the US. “Every day it’s more barriers,” said Evelyn, who still lives in New York and has two daughters, both studying at university. “It’s sad to know that people will not be able to apply for a status or something to help their situation and also help the people back home.”

The administration has also sought to terminate the temporary protected status (TPS) of people from Honduras and 12 other countries who already reside in the US, with nearly half of these countries ranked by Notre Dame as among the most climate-vulnerable places in the world.

The US Supreme Court is now considering an appeal to the TPS revocation for people hailing from two of the affected countries: Syria and Haiti, which have suffered recent droughts and hurricanes, respectively, as well as violent unrest. Environmental perils in these and other countries have been cited by the federal government when granting TPS status to allow people to remain in the US.

But the current administration’s sweeping bans on entry to the US will “keep the radical Islamic terrorists out of our country” and resolve deficiencies in vetting people, Trump has said. (The State Department was contacted for comment about climate-related immigration.)

Most of the banned countries are at the epicenter of an escalating climate displacement crisis, with the United Nations estimating severe heatwaves, droughts, storms, and floods have uprooted 250 million people globally over the past decade, the equivalent of 70,000 displacements every day.

It’s unknown how many of these people flee over borders, with most migration taking place internally—in 2025, nearly 30 million people were forced by disasters to move within their countries, recent figures show. Wildfires, such as those that incinerated parts of Los Angeles last year, were the largest cause of such displacement.

But experts agree that there is a growing cohort of so-called “climate refugees” fleeing their home countries as the planet continues to dangerously overheat. There are currently no official pathways to do so, however, with neither US law nor the UN’s 1951 refugee convention recognizing environmental disasters as a reason to gain protection in another country.

“People are being displaced by climate change, the number is growing every year and, increasingly, the displacements are permanent,” said Jocelyn Perry, program manager of the climate displacement program at Refugees International. Residents of developing countries now blacklisted by the US struggle to deal with the loss of crops, sea level rise, and other upheavals worsened by global heating, she added.

“A house in Florida may be able to withstand a category four hurricane, but there are people around the world unable to deal with that in any way and they are bearing the brunt of this,” said Perry.

Advocates say that people will typically be displaced by a climate-fueled disaster, which leads to a separate but related misfortune, such as violence, that spurs them to leave their country. War or persecution can, unlike climate change, be used as a reason to claim asylum.

“Climate change is not necessarily the first issue that displaced people raise,” said Perry. “But if, say, a family’s crops fail for three years and they have to move to an urban area and they can’t find work or it’s dangerous there, climate change has played a key role in their movement—even if their asylum claim is because of the violence that follows.”

The US is the world’s largest emitter of planet-heating pollution in history. However, Trump has dismissed any need to act on the climate crisis, which he calls a “hoax” and “bullshit,” and has demanded the world remain wedded to fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has effectively shut down the US refugee program, other than to white South Africans, and dismantled overseas aid that ameliorates the symptoms of a warming world, such as the spread of disease. Cuts to USAID engineered by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, are forecast to result in the deaths of about 4.5 million young children, in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, over the next five years.

“All of these actions will increase displacement, and the Trump administration will try to dissuade people from coming to the US border through cruel and inhumane policies, third-country deportation, and child detention,” said Perry.

“I don’t know if that will deter people if the other option is risking death or injury at home, though, so people will still make that journey,” she added. “We are seeing political decisions in the US and in Europe, too, that will leave more people stuck in vulnerable places and unable to respond. With worsening climate change, this is going to be horrific for the rest of the world.”

The one part of the US immigration apparatus that does factor in the climate crisis is TPS, by which foreign nationals already in the US are granted renewable one- or two-year stays if war or natural disaster hits their homeland.

Syrians were granted TPS in 2024 on the basis, among other things, of falling wheat production and “drought-like conditions” that have plagued the country in recent years. Ethiopia has been hit by severe drought and flooding, displacing more than 4 million people, the country’s TPS status from the same year concluded, while about 350,000 Haitians in the US would risk returning to one of the countries “most affected by extreme weather events,” according to a 2023 determination granting a TPS extension.

The Trump administration has terminated TPS status for a swathe of countries, however, with the courts set to decide on the status of several of these, including the Supreme Court case involving Syria and Haiti. “There are tens of thousands of people who have fled because of natural disasters,” said Geoffrey Pipoly, a lawyer representing six plaintiffs from Haiti, which has been hit by two huge hurricanes since 2016. “Haiti has been smack dab in the middle of this for decades.”

Even those still protected by TPS face uncertainty. A doctor originally from Sudan, who did not want to be named, said he left for the US after drought accelerated conflict in his country, which has been locked in a civil war for the past three years.

“It’s too dry, there’s not enough water, the lands were just left without anyone to cultivate them and millions have fled,” he said. “The conflicts are affected by climate change and the difficulty of people sharing resources in that part of the world. I did not see any hope in things improving.”

Sudan is still on the TPS list but only until October. “It would be very, very tough, very difficult to go back,” said the doctor, who has still not heard whether an application made for a work permit has been successful. “One of the reasons people come to the US is because they think there is a law, everybody is treated equally. But I think this is no longer the case.”

The Supreme Court ruling is expected by late June or early July.

Efforts to update the US immigration system to include consideration of the climate crisis have so far floundered. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) defines a “refugee” as anyone who is unable to return to their home nation due to a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political viewpoint.

It does not include protections for those displaced by environmental degradation—something researchers and advocates have long said is necessary. In 2021 and 2023, Democratic lawmakers aimed to codify such a change with the Climate Displaced Persons Act, which would amend the INA to provide durable legal status and resettlement support to people forced to relocate to the US due to climate disasters.

“As disasters supercharged by climate change cause disruption and devastation around the world, the Trump administration wants to both destroy programs meant to build more resilient countries and make it impossible for those without recourse to seek refuge in the United States,” said the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, who introduced the proposal both times.

Such legislation is needed now more than ever, Markey said. “Trump’s attacks on foreign aid programs, his disregard of climate science, and his attacks on immigrants all come from the same playbook,” he said.

The bill would also ensure that agencies collect data on climate-related displacement. That could remove a major roadblock to establishing and maintaining protections for those affected, said Hannah Flamm, deputy director of policy at the International Refugee Assistance Program (IRAP).

“There’s vast data globally on internal displacement on account of climate, but there’s virtually no data on international displacement on account of climate,” she said, adding that Markey’s proposal is a “valiant effort.”

“Whether or not it passes, it is critical to mobilize advocacy and to reinforce the need to meet this need,” she said.

Given the current political environment, however, the prospect of a new climate migration framework appears dim. “I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of optimism right now that any change could occur anytime in the near future,” Perry said.

Amid a broader push for mass deportations by the administration, “climate has been put on the back burner to safeguard the very concept of regular migration as a whole,” she added.

A future administration could try to implement a sort of climate visa to the US, but it’s more likely that it would focus on limiting damage around the world that displaces people in the first place, according to Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International.

“If the tide was to turn, it might be more for adaptation funding to help people stay where they are, rather than a new visa,” Schacher said.

“We have our own displacement in the US, too—we aren’t immune from this. Right now the sympathy for immigrants, even people displaced by the worst persecution, is nil. It’s hard to see any sort of expansive opening—up, even if that’s what people need.”

Dharna Noor contributed additional reporting.

Vilès Dorsainvil has thought a lot about desperation recently. Specifically, what desperation forces people to do, and the tragedy it seems to attract. As a Haitian immigrant and the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, he has seen a desperate community seeking stability in the United States, only to find that the ground has shifted.

Dorsainvil has lived in the US since December 2020, when his mother insisted that he leave Haiti after he began receiving anonymous threats and demands for funds. He landed in Fort Lauderdale with just enough money for his rent and the burden of supporting a family back home. The only person he knew when he reached his destination was his nephew who lived in Springfield, Ohio. Within 72 hours, Dorsainvil went there.

Dorsainvil arrived in Springfield, a small city of about 60,000 residents, an hour west of the state capital, before the Haitian population began to soar. The island country had never recovered from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 2010 that devastated it and created the circumstances for subsequent prolonged food insecurity, rising gang violence, and deteriorating access to medical care. When Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, Dorsainvil was relatively settled as a factory worker in Springfield. Given the chaos back home, he applied for and was granted Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation that protects people from deportation if their country is deemed unsafe. It meant that as long as the Secretary of Homeland Security renewed Haiti’s TPS, Dorsainvil could live and work in Springfield.

After Moïse’s assassination, more than 100,000 people living in Haiti became eligible for TPS, and eventually about 15,000 Haitians settled in Springfield. They paid taxes, raised their children, started businesses, and worked many jobs that others wouldn’t take. They also became the lightning rods for much of the free-floating anti-migrant sentiment fomented by Trump’s 2024 campaign and, then, his administration.

Soon after baselessly claiming that Haitians were “eating the pets” of Springfield residents during a presidential debate in September 2024, Trump vowed that should he be reelected, he would deport Haitians. That November, Trump won Clark County, of which Springfield is the seat, with nearly two-thirds of the vote. During his second term, he came close to fulfilling his promise when then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began the process of terminating Temporary Protective Status for countries that came up for review, including Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Haiti. Established by Congress in 1990, TPS grants legal status to people fleeing war, natural disasters, or unrest, and is designated in 6-, 12-, or 18-month increments. Many countries’ designations have been renewed continuously for years, if not decades, because conditions remain unlikely to improve. After Noem announced she wouldn’t renew Haiti’s TPS, Haitians and Springfield itself prepared for ICE to descend soon after the designation was set to expire on February 3, 2026.

But the ICE wave never came. Haitian TPS holders, including Dorsainvil’s younger brother, had sued the administration, and on the eve of Haiti’s TPS expiration, a federal judge postponed it. Since then, more than 330,000 Haitians living in the US with TPS have been in legal limbo as they wait for the Supreme Court to decide whether to allow their protections to expire. State by state, the ramifications quickly appeared. In Ohio, for example, the driver’s licenses of Haitian TPS holders expired in mid-March, and they have been unable to renew them. Until June 5, when a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled against the Trump administration, the federal government also stopped issuing work permits and processing asylum claims from Haiti and 38 other Latin American, Asian, and African countries and Palestine.

“Our immigration system prior to Trump has suffered from really long backlogs for people seeking asylum specifically,” said Emily Brown, director of the Ohio State University law school’s Immigration Clinic, which provides free legal representation to immigrants facing deportation. The sweeping halt of immigration processes only exacerbates that, Brown said, and has also closed a vital path to family reunification. Immigrants who have fled their home countries can petition for immediate family to join them only once they are granted asylum or refugee status. Many immigrants who have been in the US for years, Brown’s clients included, have been stuck on the threshold of approval—some have completed the steps and only need an asylum officer’s sign-off.

As Haitians and TPS holders around the country wait for the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to allow the Trump administration to end their legal status, in Springfield, they’ve retreated into the shadows. Haitians are leaving the city, Dorsainvil says, though it’s been far from a “mass exodus.” Some have attempted to go to Canada, others to Columbus. “I call it, ‘To leave or not to leave,’ because where are you going to go?” Dorsainvil tells me. “If you leave to go somewhere else in the USA, you will still be a target.”

If you aren’t looking for Springfield’s Haitian Support Center, you likely won’t find it. It’s tucked discreetly in the back of a church on the city’s east side, surrounded by single-family homes on one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The sole indicator of the center’s presence is a sign on a locked door bearing its logo and welcoming visitors in English and Haitian Creole. When I arrived on a recent Friday afternoon, just two other people were there. Neither was Dorsainvil.

About 45 minutes later, he arrived and ushered me into a windowless room he shares with a colleague, their desks an arm’s length away from each other. Between two laptops and a desktop, notebooks and files, and more than a dozen yellow sticky notes plastered beside his screens and along his walls, Dorsainvil’s desk is as cluttered as his to-do list. As he answered his ringing phone, I studied the back wall of the office, where a framed print bears a simple inscription: “Piti piti zwazo fè nich li.” It’s a Haitian proverb meaning “little by little, the bird builds its nest.”

As thousands of Haitians flocked to his city, Dorsainvil realized Springfield had no nest, or even a branch to land on. He helped found the Haitian Support Center to serve as a “bridge” between Haitians and legal, financial, and material resources, particularly because immigrants are vulnerable to scams and exploitation.

When we met, he had just returned from a failed attempt to recover a $1,900 security deposit a rental agency was holding for a woman who had moved to New York. She took a Greyhound bus back to Springfield when neither she nor Dorsainvil could reach her property manager. When the pair showed up to the agency’s office that morning, the property manager was nowhere to be found. “Come back Monday,” agency staff told the woman. She boarded a Greyhound back to New York, unable to miss work to wait until Monday. Dorsainvil promised to return to the agency himself.

This same woman, Dorsainvil told me, tried to help her younger brother apply for asylum. A New York firm told her they’d do it for $24,000. She put down $3,000 for a service nonprofits and immigration clinics, like Ohio State’s, can do for free. Brown noted that while some firms charge “exorbitant fees,” the cost of litigating asylum claims has risen as backlogs make cases lengthier and more complex. “Good attorneys are cost-prohibitive for a lot of people,” Brown said, “and it leads them to having to choose between funding their legal case and their basic needs.”

Dorsainvil’s cases are a litany of awful experiences: women and men vulnerable to human trafficking because they lost their work authorizations; families coming home to eviction notices with less than $20 in their bank accounts; people who have “nothing” and nowhere to go. There is parallel desperation between Haitian immigrants and the families they support back home that Dorsainvil can’t ignore; if a Haitian in the US gets detained or deported, it’s a matter of “life and death” for them and every person in Haiti who relies on them.

Because the Haitian Support Center’s reach is restricted to the Springfield community, he cannot help recover the $3,000 from the “predatory law firm” the woman who moved to New York engaged; nor can he help the immigrants frequently calling from Columbus or elsewhere in the state. Money flows to the center through small donations, some as little as $5. And, like Dorsainvil, most of its staff are Haitian immigrants. Should TPS expire, they face the same fate as the people they help.

Dorsainvil doesn’t know how much longer the Haitian Support Center can continue its work, including paying people’s rents and utility bills. But he feels obligated to continue until he’s forced to stop. He acknowledged that his work and status as a high-profile Haitian TPS holder place him at significant risk, but he calls it the “ultimate sacrifice.”

 

“Folks keep asking me what I am doing here, why I am exposing myself knowing I am not a citizen,” Dorsainvil said.

“I consider myself nothing when I know—when I experience firsthand— how people are going to suffer.”

Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center at Rose Goute Creole Restaurant, sits with interpreter James Fleurijean, left, a board member of the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, in Springfield, Ohio, Saturday, January 25, 2025.Jessie Wardarski/AP

Of the 1.3 million TPS holders in the US, 97 percent are from just five countries, with the lion’s share coming from Venezuela and Haiti. Less than three weeks after Trump retook office, Noem announced her decision to terminate TPS for Venezuelans and began moving down the list soon after. By August 2025, DHS announced its intent to terminate TPS for more than a third of the 17 countries with active designations, Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Haiti among them. When the Supreme Court ruled in October 2025 that the Trump administration could terminate Venezuelans’ TPS designation even as litigation continued, the unsigned and unreasoned order offered no guidance for the wave of lawsuits behind it.

Haitians have been granted TPS continuously, either through DHS or court order, since the 2010 earthquake. Especially after 2021, thousands have flocked to Springfield, drawn by the promises of stable factory and warehouse work, a relatively low cost of living, and a burgeoning community of fellow resettled Haitians.

Many Haitians who were trained as physicians back home have taken nursing and other healthcare jobs in Clark County, including serving as interpreters. Vilès Dorsainvil’s younger brother, Vilbrun, is one such physician who became a nurse and worked at Springfield Regional Hospital. Vilbrun is a lead plaintiff in the TPS case before the Supreme Court; Vilès, who was already a plaintiff in a separate federal case challenging the termination of TPS, recruited him.

Like countless other Rust Belt cities, Springfield struggled with decades of depopulation as manufacturers moved out. And like other Ohio towns, particularly in the western part of the state, Springfield was devastated by the opioid epidemic, ranking consistently among US cities with the highest rates of fatal overdose. With thousands of new residents more than eager to work hard jobs for low pay, Springfield’s tax revenue increased, its unemployment rate decreased, and nearly a dozen Haitian-owned businesses opened in town.

Even with the benefits that may have come to the city, anti-Haitian sentiment in Springfield started long before Trump and Ohio’s own Sen. JD Vance capitalized on it during the 2024 campaign. The spark that ignited the flame came in August 2023, when a Haitian TPS-holder crashed into a school bus near Springfield, killing an 11-year-old boy. The driver, Hermanio Joseph, did not have a valid US driver’s license, because, he testified, he had not yet gathered the required documents. In May 2024, a jury convicted him of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide, both felonies, and he was sentenced to 9 to 13 years in prison.

Joseph’s arrest and conviction only fueled the growing resentment against Haitians in Springfield. By the time Vance claimed in early September 2024 that his office was fielding reports of pets and wildlife being “abducted by Haitian migrants,” outraged residents had already swarmed city commission meetings, claiming Haitians were “invading” the community, driving up housing costs, and bringing a “flood of drugs” with them. The Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group Springfield is currently suing, descended on the city multiple times that summer, lobbing racial slurs at city officials and insisting the influx of Haitians threatened the city’s “good White residents.”

Trump’s targeting of Haitians has splintered Ohio’s Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Springfield-area’s two Republicans joined Democrats in April in voting to extend Haitians’ TPS through April 2029. But they remain largely loyal to Trump’s immigration crackdown, following Ohio’s two Republican senators voting to give ICE and Customs and Border Protection $70 billion over the next three years. One of those senators, former Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, is opposing the man who appointed him to replace Vance.

Gov. Mike DeWine, who with his wife helped establish a network of free schools in Port-au-Prince that closed due to violence, has repeatedly defended Ohio’s Haitian immigrants and called ending TPS the “wrong” choice. The situation in Haiti has “never been worse,” DeWine told reporters in February. After a federal judge halted the TPS termination from going into effect, First Lady Fran DeWine said she and the governor were “happy” for both Haitians and Springfield at large, noting immigrants’ contributions to the economy and community. “We’re just all praying for good things to happen in Springfield for everyone,” she said.

The governor’s prayers and verbal support fall flat to immigrants and advocates, however, when followed by inaction; even as he opposes ending TPS for Haitians, DeWine has clarified that Ohio would “follow” whatever the court decides. “He’s acting like, ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do, I’m just the governor of Ohio,’” Lynn Tramonte, executive director of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said. She compared DeWine to Illinois’ Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, whose “fire-in-the-belly” response to ICE enforcement included calling Trump’s bluff on his arrest threat and standing behind legislation protecting immigrants at courthouses and hospitals, even as the federal government fights it. In Ohio, in contrast, immigrants rights advocates told me of asylum seekers, Haitian or otherwise, detained at their immigration check-ins, shuttled off to private prisons and county jails in the northeastern and southwestern corners of the state, and deported.

“There are people who will be glad they’re gone,” Marjory Wentworth, a Springfield resident and organizer with the local immigrant rights organization G92, told me. There is a burgeoning housing and homelessness crisis in Springfield, which some city officials have blamed, in part, on out-of-state companies buying properties and jacking up rents. The anger and blame may be wrongfully placed on immigrants, Wentworth said, but she can understand the dynamic.

The city has also faced serious consequences from the national attention sparked by the Trump administration’s attacks. It extends beyond the dozens of bomb threats made on schools, houses of worship, and government buildings. Within months of Trump assuming office, Clark County lost $4.25 million in federal funding, including $2.7 million from a Health and Human Services critical disease grant. Without that grant, the county health department laid off crucial staff, including disease investigators and medical translators, and had to abandon its plans for a new health facility and mobile clinic—important steps in improving access to primary and preventative care, especially in an area with little to no public transportation.

Now, with Haitians unable to lawfully work, Springfield’s economic outlook has deteriorated. Federal data show that the Springfield metropolitan area lost more jobs than any other area in Ohio, losing more than 1,000 between 2024 and 2025, nearly all from the manufacturing industry. Between 2021 and 2022, as large numbers of Haitians began settling in Springfield and tax policies shifted to accommodate remote work, the city generated $9.2 million in income taxes; between 2023 and 2025, income tax revenue was only $3 million. By June 2025, Springfield’s city finance director asserted Springfield’s economy was at a “critical juncture”: Income tax revenue, the “backbone” of the municipal budget, sharply declined and then stagnated. Between the loss of income taxes and the exhaustion of federal pandemic rescue funds, “Our general fund is under real strain,” Finance Director Katie Eviston told the city commission last June.

Publicity, as Wentworth and other Springfield activists have learned, is a double-edged sword; not only have Haitians been the targets of death threats and vandalism, but advocates themselves have faced harassment, including a social media conspiracy campaign that claimed local churches and community organizations were running a human trafficking scheme, stealing donations, and working with ICE to convince Haitians to self-deport. After the district court postponed Haitian’sTPS expiration, schools and government offices closed due to a renewed wave of bomb threats.

G92 and the Haitian Support Center are part of a sprawling web of community organizations advocating for Haitian immigrants in the Springfield area. They’ve offered rental assistance, food drives, transportation, and know-your-rights training to immigrants and advocates anticipating ICE activity. But beyond material support and prayers, Wentworth acknowledges there’s nothing advocates can do when Haitians’ futures ultimately lie in the hands of nine Supreme Court justices.

In late April, the court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe, cases brought by Haitian and Syrian TPS holders, respectively. The TPS holders argue that Noem ignored the necessary process in her review of TPS for both countries, including consulting other agencies about conditions in those nations. In ending TPS for Haitians, Noem insisted that renewing humanitarian protections would be “contrary to the national interest of the United States,” because Haiti lacks a central government to flag criminals attempting to enter the US. Even as the State Department maintains a “do not travel” advisory for risk of kidnappings, sexual assault, and robbery in Haiti, Noem declared the country acceptable for immigrants to repatriate to. Haitians will face the same dangers if deported back, Dorsainvil emphasizes: “There is no safe place in Haiti.”

Trump administration lawyers argue that all aspects of Noem’s determination are immune from judicial review. Ruling otherwise would open a hole “a truck could be driven through,” Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices. TPS holders’ attorneys, meanwhile, insisted that siding with the Trump administration would write it a “blank check” to enact federal policies without following required steps to prevent politicization and abuse.

And in Haitians’ case, attorney Geoffrey Pipoly argued, Noem’s decision was motivated by Trump’s racist views and his “bare dislike of Haitians in particular.” While the administration bolsters a refugee program for white South Africans, the president has called Haiti a “shithole country” whose immigrants, alongside those from other nonwhite countries, are “poisoning the blood” of America. “He vowed that he would terminate Haiti’s TPS, and that is exactly what happened,” Pipoly said.

The court is expected to issue its opinion in late June or early July. Springfield advocates aren’t feeling optimistic, but even if the court sides with TPS holders, Wentworth said it will not feel like a win. “The administration is making it as difficult as possible” for Haitians to remain and communities to support them. Ohio State’s Brown agreed, describing the Trump administration’s immigration policy generally as a “mass delegalization” project with one goal: “They are trying to push people into the shadows and encourage people to just give up and leave,” she said.

For most of our conversation, Dorsainvil spoke in soft, yet emphatic, tones indicative of his theological training as a Moravian pastor. But when he recalled the vulnerable, desperate people he’s helped in just the past week, he sounded exasperated. “Why is the administration doing that?” he often asks himself. He supplies the answer: In the Trump administration’s view, “I see you as the other, and once I see you that way, your life, your misery, and your experience don’t matter to me.”

Last spring, during a track meet at a Texas high school, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf, a white student and fellow athlete from a rival school, during an argument. Whether or not Anthony killed Metcalf wasn’t up for discussion: Anthony had admitted his guilt, and there were several witnesses present during the altercation.

The question at the center of Anthony’s trial was whether or not the Black teen was acting in self-defense. Texas is one of 31 states with “Stand Your Ground” laws that allow people to use reasonable force, including deadly force, against an assailant under certain circumstances. 

Similar laws have been invoked in several high-profile cases across the country, including the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, where George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, was acquitted after claiming he shot the 17-year-old in self-defense. Zimmerman outweighed Martin and initiated the encounter; Metcalf was also larger than Anthony and the first to engage. But more than a decade later, Anthony would not be given that same judicial grace.

On Tuesday, a jury convicted Anthony, now 19 years old, of murder. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. There wasn’t a single Black person on the jury—every Black potential juror was struck before trial. The case has reignited a decades-long conversation, both on and off social media: In the US criminal justice system, who do “Stand Your Ground” laws protect?  

Civil rights activists, celebrities, and politicians have expressed outrage at the case, with some saying that Anthony’s conviction highlights a clear double standard in self-defense claims in the United States: If a white person kills a Black person, courts (and white juries) are more likely to rule the killing justified than if the situation were reversed.

And the data backs that up.

According to a 2021 study from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates against gun violence, homicides are deemed justified more often, in nearly every state, when the shooter is white and the victim is Black. A study from the Urban Institute found that homicides with a Black shooter and a white victim were ruled justified self-defense in a little more than 1 percent of cases. For a white shooter and Black victim, the figure jumps to 11.4 percent.

The response to Anthony’s conviction certainly hasn’t been helped by the far-right mouthpieces and conservative media figures who have invoked the case to justify blatantly racist rhetoric. Jake Lang, a far-right influencer who rose to prominence for participating in the January 6 insurrection, stood outside the Frisco courtroom in the days leading up to the verdict, spewing hateful rhetoric and posting it for his 169,000 Instagram followers to see.

I cannot say whether or not Anthony was acting in self-defense, but I can say that, while living in a country that has made the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse famous, I understand the Black community’s frustration.

The last major tournament staged by FIFA, the body behind the World Cup, was last summer’s Club World Cup—an international tournament where Donald Trump crashed the trophy presentation at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, joining the winning team’s celebrations as they lifted the prize. 

As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote at the time, autocracies have long used international sports events as a platform to whitewash abuses of power. Aptly, human rights advocates coined the term “sportswashing” to describe it. During the Club World Cup, ICE continued to raid and occupy Los Angeles, Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the US military struck three nuclear facilities in Iran shortly after Israel launched strikes of its own in the middle of negotiations.

For the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, which starts Thursday, the situation may be even worse.

“If we’re talking about President Donald Trump trying to use the event to sportswash, we would start with what he is trying to deflect attention from,” Jules Boykoff, a professor of politics at Pacific University in Oregon and former professional soccer player who represented the United States’ under-23 team, told me last month. “We’ve got the terrible approval ratings right now. We’ve got the Iran war he’s carrying out with Israel that’s going terribly in terms of meeting his goals.”

Boykoff has written extensively about the intersection of politics and international sports, including the Olympics—the 2028 Games in Los Angeles will provide Trump ample further opportunities for sportswashing—as well as activism against systems of power behind the massive developments that come with events like the World Cup or the Olympics, and how they intersect with politics beyond sporting events.

Boykoff’s latest book, Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine, was released June 9. I spoke to him about the upcoming games, the sportswashing phenomenon, and the wider politics of international sporting events.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I’ve seen the term “sportswashing” enter mainstream coverage, but it’s often used to characterize autocratic figures and states in the Global South. How do you think it applies to this upcoming World Cup?

Sportswashing is when political leaders use sports to appear important or legitimate on the world stage, while deflecting attention from chronic social problems, from human rights woes at home, and also while teeing up opportunities for political and economic advancement.

And yes, the term has been used in the past, I’ll be honest, in a somewhat xenophobic, ethnocentric fashion. It’s waggling a finger at those other countries that do it. Now, they do it: Russia in the 2018 Men’s World Cup definitely was a sportswashing endeavor; Qatar in 2022 was definitely a sportswashing endeavor. 

But it can also happen in places that are putative democracies. I know it’s a discussion now as to whether the United States is even a fully-fledged democracy anymore. Some of my political science brethren are calling it the new “competitive authoritarianism,” not unlike what we saw under [former Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán in Hungary. The point is, it can happen in places like the United States. 

Second, when we ask ourselves whether sportswashing works or not, a lot of times it’s implicit that it’s talking about a global audience. And that’s true. You could look at the Qatar World Cup of 2022 and, after the World Cup, their tourism numbers went up and they became even more of an important mediator in the region. But you should also look at domestic audiences.

Right after the Sochi, Russia, Winter Olympics of 2014, President [Vladimir] Putin’s ratings were higher than ever. He was standing on the stage looking legitimate as a world leader. What did he do with that? He invaded Crimea between the Olympics and the Paralympics. Domestic audiences can be really important here as well. Putin used those two events to basically get the oligarchs in line and on sides for him.

So that takes us to 2026, and while the [term] sportswashing hasn’t often been applied to the United States, I think it very much should, if we accept the definition that I gave before.

If we’re talking about President Donald Trump trying to use the event to sportswash, we would start with what he is trying to deflect attention from. We’ve got the terrible approval ratings right now. We’ve got the Iran war he’s carrying out with Israel that’s going terribly in terms of meeting his goals. There’s the lingering Epstein files, in which he’s named thousands of times. The list goes on and on. He needs to use this opportunity to look important on the world stage, especially for a domestic audience ahead of these midterm elections. And let’s be real, President Donald Trump has used sports to his political advantage more than any president in the recent history of the country. 

We shouldn’t be surprised that he’s going to talk about the importance of this World Cup to his presidency. He’s going to talk about that UFC event happening three days into the World Cup on the White House lawn. And he’s going to talk after that about the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

The book looks back at FIFA’s history, and accusations of sportswashing, corruption, or just excessive commercialization even before this World Cup. I was specifically interested in an inflection point around the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Can you expand on that history and how that foundation was really established?

To understand the history of the World Cup in regards to sportswashing, you have to go back to 1934, the second World Cup ever, in Italy under Benito Mussolini—where he used that soccer team as this sort of embodiment of machismo, the embodiment of the fascist new man. Mussolini would actually ride around on a horse without a shirt a long time before Putin ever did. 

He talked about how the players on the Italian national team were what he called “soldiers of sport” and as the new fascist man who was bigger than just what was happening on the field. When they won that World Cup, he maximized his propaganda value. 

If you shimmy forward to the event you were talking about in 1978, this was the World Cup for Argentina carried out by a military junta. Only 700 meters from where Argentina beat the Netherlands in the final, 3-1, was a place where leftists were imprisoned, tortured, and even in some cases killed. They got a massive sportswash assist from Henry Kissinger, the human rights ogre of yore who showed up there and palled around with General [Jorge Rafael] Videla, the guy who was really running the junta at that time, who was maximizing his leverage over the World Cup. 

Before the World Cup started and journalists from around the world descended on Argentina, the junta dialed back its direct repression—took a little bit of a break, if you will. They ramped it back up after the global media left, but it did provide an opportunity for groups like Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo—[mothers fighting against Argentina’s military dictatorship]—to have a bit more space, and the global media were there to cover it. I’m interested to see whether that happens [again].

Let’s be real, though: [for] the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Putin actually passed a law that said it was illegal to protest in the host cities [and surrounding regions], but you could protest elsewhere. I’ll be interested to see whether, under Trump, there is space for dissent.

You just mentioned soccer fans being a part of organizing. Where do you see space to expand that coalition?

These events are so huge, and they’re so enormously popular that they provide activists with an opportunity to piggyback. For the Olympics, I’ve seen this over and over again. 

I lived in Rio de Janeiro in the lead-up to and during those Olympics, and I saw it out in the streets with my own two eyes. We saw it in Tokyo in the lead-in until it got scuppered by Covid. And we’re seeing it in Los Angeles where activists have been active since 2017.

It’s really true when activists chant “the whole world is watching” with the World Cup and Olympics. So it’s an incredible opportunity to speak to a wider audience. 

Before I started writing about the politics of sports, I wrote about the suppression of political dissent. It was hard to jumpstart conversations with people about that topic, especially with people who didn’t necessarily hold my [political] beliefs.

I’ve had a lot more success using sport to open the political door to have discussions with people who I might not agree with on a lot of things, but they can agree with me [that the way] we use public money should be more savvy, instead of just handing it over to the barons of sport.

And that can be a real entry point for having conversations about other things like policing around these sports mega-events, or how locals are kind of left out in the cold. I think that’s the logic behind a lot of the activism we will be seeing at the World Cup. I’ll be interested to see how that pans out.

I am also interested in your experience in professional soccer and with the US men’s under-23 team, as players’ unions have criticized player schedules. It’s almost the end of the season and I’m already seeing players getting injured and tired. Do you relate your experiences while playing to your thought process now [about] how these mega-tournaments function?

When I was running up and down the field for the US under-23 men’s national soccer team, I was 19 years old. That’s when I played my first international match against Brazil. I was quite clueless about a lot of the things that we were talking about today. 

When I arrived at the first match, I expected people to cheer vociferously. I’d been weaned on a steady diet of pro-US propaganda. And that just wasn’t the case all around France. This was a tournament in France where we played Brazil, and then what was Yugoslavia, what was Czechoslovakia, and what was the Soviet Union. It really got me thinking. 

We did not have a union back then, and when I was playing professional soccer, that was actually a real problem. We got paid okay, but we could have gotten paid so much more. More importantly, we had no protection. So if we got hurt, I mean, I could just like lose my contract the next day if I got seriously hurt. 

So I’m really happy to see these unions popping up both in Major League Soccer in the United States—it’s only getting stronger—[and] at the international level, there’s FIFPro, who has been raising a lot of important questions about athlete health and safety at this World Cup.

There’s the number of matches that players have played. You can chalk up quite a lot of this to the FIFA greed machine. They’re cranking out tournament after tournament—they trial ballooned the idea of having a FIFA Men’s World Cup every two years. 

FIFPro [has also] been smart and outspoken on the issues around climate change and its attendant heat issues. There are a few indoor stadiums that are air conditioned, but places like Miami are absolutely not. 

And what does FIFA do? They decided to institute water breaks partway through each half, regardless of weather at the World Cup. On one hand, great, the FIFPro union got a concession for worker safety. On the other hand, they’re using it as an opportunity to make even more money. I mean, they’re allowing commercials during those water breaks. Leave it to FIFA to figure out a way to monetize climate change to their advantage.

I think that things have changed a lot, and for the better, since I was playing [pro] soccer in the 1990s, and I hope things continue to get better. I’m concerned that groups like UEFA, the European body for soccer, and FIFA are just going to continue to milk these players for all the money they can squeeze out of them. But the World Cup is a good chance to raise awareness about this, especially both in the lead-in to the tournament, where players are coming down with injuries, who’ve played thousands of minutes over the last few months, but also during the tournament in the early stages, when some big names, unfortunately, might just get hurt.

Saudi Arabia has the 2034 World Cup and other sports investments—like their own soccer league with players like Cristiano Ronaldo, as well as golf and e-sports. Where do you see Saudi Arabia within this framework and their relationships with FIFA and the US?

Saudi Arabia has been active in sportswashing for a long time. They’re also spending quite a bit of money on sort of what we might call macho sports—boxing and UFC, and so on. That fits pretty nicely with the history you and I were talking about before, with authoritarians affiliating themselves with these macho fighters. Trump does it, of course, all the time.

One episode in the book that is extremely instructive is how two sportswashers, President Trump and [Saudi crown prince] Mohammed bin Salman, came together for a state dinner and extended visit in Washington, DC. These folks internationally are often working together and supporting each other’s sportswashes. It [also] reminds us that sportswashing isn’t just [events]—it’s about cutting deals and advancing yourself politically and economically. And that’s all that that state dinner was about.

Cristiano Ronaldo, who you just referenced, was there. He [hadn’t] come to the US since 2014 because of the credible rape allegations against him, [but] he knew Trump would not let anything happen to him. 

Another key ligature to all this is FIFA President Gianni Infantino. He was buddies with Putin back in 2018 for that World Cup, played football in the Kremlin with Putin in the lead-up to that tournament, and received a special friendship order from Putin afterwards. He lifted his residence, moved to Qatar for the 2022 World Cup, and ran interference for the emirs there around all the issues with human rights and [migrant] workers. And now he moved to the United States. He and Trump are extraordinarily friendly. They both have a penchant for political spectacle. They both like being around wealth and affluence and they both like being in the spotlight.

Infantino handed the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, there was no real serious bid process around that. There’s so much to say about that, but I would argue Infantino has a crucial role in all this.

I’m curious about a lot of people who are justly criticizing and boycotting the World Cup—what they enjoy about soccer and what it could be. Do you have any thoughts on that, and how we could get to the ideal where soccer is legitimately for everyone who has some form of the sport that they love?

I have had the privilege of soccer enriching my life from the time I was a four-year-old kid.

I understand the effective power of sport and how it can be channeled for good. In my memoir, Kicking, there’s a lot of stories about how soccer activists in Portland fought back against the power brokers of soccer in Portland. They got the [Portland Thorns’] general manager [fired after supporting a coach alleged to have abused players]. They got the owner of the Thorns to sell the team. Those are huge victories that wouldn’t have happened were it not for the bonds that soccer created being used then to pivot into political action. 

With all the money swirling through the highest levels of echelons of sport, I’m concerned that maybe the game has become so heavily commercialized that it’s losing a lot of the luster of community-building. But, you know, there are leagues around the country and around the world that aren’t necessarily at that highest level that we watch on TV every Saturday and Sunday, but where you can engage in a much more community-oriented way.

In Portland, Oregon, we’ve got a professional [lower league] team called Portland Bangers FC. And it’s super fun. The mascot is like a seven-foot-tall sausage, and it’s totally goofy. The soccer is fine, but it’s really about community, and tickets are very affordable. Now we have a team called the Cherry Bombs in Portland where the sponsor is Planned Parenthood. 

I think [community-building through soccer] is too important to give up on, and I’m going to keep fighting alongside others for improvements for worker-athletes on the field and for conditions for fans and others off the field.

An immigration judge has ordered the deportation of Columbia University graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi, who is Palestinian, to Jordan in a legal filing published Wednesday. Mahdawi has been targeted by the Trump administration for his pro-Palestinian activism for more than a year, in a high-profile case that saw him abruptly detained by immigration authorities during an April 2025 naturalization appointment.

Mahdawi is one of hundreds of students nationwide who experienced visa revocations, arrests, or threats after participating in protests denouncing Israel. The Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, which began in the first days of President Trump’s second term, continues: many protesters are still fighting deportation cases, and in some cases criminal charges. Mahmoud Khalil, abducted as a recent Columbia graduate, was given a temporary reprieve in mid-May after he spent months in custody in 2025, missing the birth of his son—but must now petition the Supreme Court to halt deportation proceedings to Algeria. 

Other targeted noncitizen students, like Tufts’ Rümeysa Öztürk and Cornell’s Momodou Taal, chose to leave after facing the American security state. Öztürk, who was detained for weeks over an op-ed in Tufts’ student newspaper, returned to Turkey after graduating. 

“The time stolen from me by the U.S. government belongs not just to me, but to the children and youth I have dedicated my life to advocating for,” Öztürk wrote in April. “With them in mind, I am choosing to return home as planned.” 

Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman detained at a Columbia University protest, was held in a notorious Texas ICE jail for a year, until her release last April. She, too, is still fighting deportation. “I mean, to be imprisoned for a whole year simply for practicing my freedom of speech and to be accused of horrific things that I have nothing to do with, it’s outrageous,” Kordia told PBS in May. 

Mahdawi will be appealing his case, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a press release Wednesday. “The First Amendment protects all of us from government censorship, citizen or not,” said Nate Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “The government’s continued persecution of our client for his beliefs should send a chill down the spine of everyone in this country, because once we start allowing exceptions to the First Amendment for speech the current government doesn’t like, there’s no telling where the censorship will stop.” While a separate habeas corpus petition by Mahdawi makes its way through federal court, he cannot be re-detained or deported. 

Documents from the AAUP v. Rubio trial, in which the American Association of University Professors sued to stop the US from detaining students on ideological grounds, proved the federal government frequently used spurious sources to target students based on their political opinions. As my colleague Najib Aminy reported in January, those sources included anonymous blacklisting sites like Canary Mission. 

DHS and the State Department “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment-protected political speech,” the judge in that case wrote in his court order. “Moreover, the effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”

With Donald Trump’s pardon of former Indiana Rep. Steve Buyer over the weekend, he has now pardoned at least 11 former GOP politicians, almost all of them on charges of corruption or somehow violating the public trust.

Buyer served in Congress from 1993 to 2011, and after leaving office, he promptly went to work as a consultant and lobbyist for many of the companies that used to lobby him. In 2018, while golfing with an executive from T-Mobile, Buyer learned that the company was reviving its bid to take over Sprint, a fact that was not yet public. He promptly began buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Sprint stock. In 2019, Buyer learned of another impending merger through his work and bought shares of Navigant—a move that would later earn him several hundred thousand dollars.

In 2022, Buyer was convicted of insider trading and sentenced to 22 months in prison, which he served. The Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. In May, Trump posted letters written by Buyer’s former GOP colleagues, alleging that Buyer—who had made $354,000 from his two insider trading schemes—was a victim of the “deep state.”

“Like you, Mr. President, Steve has been the victim of lawfare conducted by the Biden Administration,” the Republican lawmakers insisted.

Trump’s official pardon of Buyer doesn’t list any specific reasons or rationale, other than the support of the other GOP politicos. Maybe it was Buyer’s penchant for golf—not only did he learn some of the insider info on the golf course, he was known in Congress for his love of the sport.

Regardless of the reasoning, Buyer’s crimes sound a lot like those committed by another onetime elected official who received clemency from Trump.

In December 2020, after losing re-election to Joe Biden, Trump pardoned former New York GOP Rep. Chris Collins, who had pleaded guilty to insider trading charges just a few weeks earlier. Collins admitted that, while attending a party at the White House in 2017, he received a phone call from the board of directors of a health care company warning that one of the company’s products had failed an important regulatory test. Collins promptly sold his shares, avoiding nearly half a million in losses he would have incurred if he had waited until the news broke publicly.

Congress is currently debating—and has been for years and years—provisions to restrict stock trading by sitting lawmakers. Current laws ban insider trading for everyone—not just members of Congress—but that definition doesn’t cover members of Congress buying and sell stocks that could be affected by legislation they vote on. One of the proposed reforms would ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, but the most recent version, advanced by the Republican majority, would allow current members to hang onto the individual stocks they already own.

Federal employees are banned from owning stocks that might be affected by their work, but the president is exempted from that. Trump does disclose his financial transactions, and earlier this spring, revealed he had made more than 3,600 stock trades this year, including numerous stocks directly impacted by decisions he made as president.

Trump’s pardons and commutations for politicians haven’t been limited to insider trading. In all, he’s given clemency to 13 former members of Congress, all of whom were either charged with or convicted various forms of financial wrongdoing or corruption.

The list includes:

• George Santos, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft.
• Michael Grimm, Republican from Long Island, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud, but also acknowledged wire fraud, hiring undocumented immigrants, and perjury.
• Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican who was convicted on 17 charges for a variety of misdeeds, including threatening to use his legislative power to stop a land deal unless he was paid by an investor.
• Duke Cunningham, a California Republican who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, conspiracy to commit bribery, wire fraud, and mail fraud.
• Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who pleaded guilty to misusing campaign funds, including to finance activities related to extramarital affairs.

Of those 13 onetime members of Congress who received clemency from Trump, two were Democrats—current Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who was facing felony charges for money laundering and bribery, and Rod Blagojevich, the former member of Congress and Illinois governor who infamously tried to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. Blagojevich appeared on The Apprentice with Trump and supported his 2020 and 2024 political campaigns.

Trump has suggested that Cuellar was indicted because, despite being a Democrat, he did not support Joe Biden’s border policies. Stepping up to help Cuellar escape prosecution did not, however, endear the Democrat lawmaker to Trump—at least not in the way Trump hoped. Cuellar said that despite being a conservative Democrat, he wasn’t about to become a Republican, earning him an angry, and threatening, Truth Social post from the president: “Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like. Oh’ well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!”

I can’t really say why I decided to cook, or otherwise procure, a dish representing every nation at the World Cup, except that I thought it might be kind of fun, and it seemed like the least I could do. If you have a family, or a roommate, or even a cat, and are planning to spend a significant percentage of your summer on the couch, watching the most important of the least important things, you ought to find some way to pull your weight around the house—or at least, to say in advance that you’re sorry. 

It was a good idea, though. And a doable one: I live in New York, a city where I can obtain just about any ingredient I could possibly need for any kind of cuisine (along with, for some reason, the worst onions you’ve ever imagined). And where, failing that, I can simply ride a few subway stops and procure a critically acclaimed meal representing first-time qualifiers Uzbekistan. Given enough time, I could have knocked this quest off slowly and gracefully.

So that was my first mistake. I neglected to plan for the fact that this men’s World Cup has—for the purposes of squeezing more money out of more people over more games—16 more countries than the last one did. That might have prompted a reconsideration of my mission, but it’s hard to walk away once you’ve announced your plan. People will just keep asking about it, and it becomes increasingly painful to force a smile and say “nope, still working on Curacao.” The burden of expectations, the sense of disappointment…You start to understand, in some small way, what it feels like to play for England.

But I did it, starting in early March and finishing with one week to spare before Mexico kicks off against South Africa. Even with breaks for work trips, family visits, and emergency mac and cheese—or maybe because so much else kept getting in the way—the three-month odyssey was ultimately more of a burden than a heroic gesture. There were some bangers along the way: the aforementioned Uzbek; a Cape Verdean dish by way of Rhode Island; a West African meal my 3-year-old, somewhat problematically, began referring to as “dad’s chicken.” Spend enough time poking around for recipes—and even more time looking for ones that are vegetable-forward, or are not yet another national version of stewed chicken—and you start to learn a thing or two about tradition, migration, and common bonds. Maybe that was the point. 

So here’s how I made it to 48, by eating, more or less in order, through the 12 groups of four teams who will meet in the tournament’s opening rounds. I want to be clear: I was not attempting to create everyone’s national dish. I did not approach this with academic rigor. I took shortcuts. I made liberal substitutions. I used random blogs and Reddit and, in one instance, TikTok. I am not trying to start anything or offend anyone; I was just a soccer fan trying to make dinner.

Group A

I started inauspiciously with a Cape Malay curry from South Africa. The dish was brought to the area by Malaysians who were enslaved by the Dutch East India Company. My recipe came from The Today Show and called for 3 tablespoons of turmeric, which I should have immediately clocked as an editing error but—in the spirit of cultural exploration—dutifully followed anyway and paid a price. For South Korea I made kalbijim, from Eric Kim’s excellent Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home, and won back a little credibility in my household; you, or at least I, simply cannot mess up braised short ribs and beef-fat croutons. Mexico was ably represented by a large order from Tacos El Bronco, and Czechia by a 1997 red-cabbage-and-apple salad recipe from the New York Times.

Group B

I split a big thing of fondue for Switzerland and wondered why I don’t eat fondue more often. Then I thought about what I had just done. The national dish of Qatar, and several other nearby states, is machboos—meat (in my case chicken) cooked with rice seasoned by an eponymous spice blend. I pulled it from an official government-sponsored cultural program’s website and it was pretty good. But what you come to realize in an eating project like this is that everyone has a national stewed chicken dish and if you aren’t being careful you could make nothing but stewed chicken for a month. For Canada, I made a New York Times recipe for coconut kale from a restaurant in Vancouver, and paired it with some maple-glazed salmon. Bosnia and Herzegovina knocked out Italy in the playoffs with a penalty from a guy who was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m just sharing that so you know. I picked up three huge slices of meat, cheese, and spinach burek from a shop in south Brooklyn, and it kicked ass.

Group C

We used to have a children’s book by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt in which one of the characters refers to herself as “a tagine machine.” It’s stuck with me, long after all the pages were torn out—so I made a chicken tagine for 2022 semi-finalists Morocco and a green-pepper salad with preserved lemon to go with. It was probably too much preserved lemon for one meal, but both were nice on their own. Haiti, back for the first time since 1974, is one of the great stories of this World Cup, and the poul ak nwa I made (another stew-adjacent chicken dish, with cashews) was a worthy entry, for the first several days I ate it. Scotland showed out with rumbledethumps, which, even if you’ve never heard of it before, I feel like you intuitively know is a dish of cabbage, potatoes, and cheese. For Brazil, I baked pão de queijo, little balls of cheesy tapioca bread. They make incredible sliders.

Group D

One of the few major upsides of the Global War on Terror is that New York has a lot of people from Australia, which enabled me to get really tremendous sausage rolls from the NoMad outpost of Bourke Street Bakery in April. On balance, you would not say it was all worth it, but I would eat these every day. I should have just made chipa for Paraguay, but that felt too similar to the pão de queijo I’d just made, so I made chipa guazu instead—a sort of cheese-and-corn souffle (at least that’s how it turned out) that I take full responsibility for. At this point, a month into the project, I was starting to hear rumblings from the loved-ones I was feeding that more vegetables would be in order. Googling “Turkey” and “vegetable dish,” I found karnabahar mucveri, a baked cauliflower recipe from Ozlem Warren. The United States is also in this group; I got Tacos El Bronco again. 

Group E

I had never had döner kebab before, but our entry for Germany immediately slotted itself into the family sandwich rotation. I’ll admit to not having put too much thought into the choice—we have a local döner kebab shop, it has Berlin in its name, that’s good enough for me—but the kebab has become a symbol among members of JD Vance’s beloved German far-white for the kinds of people they don’t like. One of my rules for normal living is to live your life without being triggered by a sandwich. Less controversially, I made keshi yena—ground meat baked in gouda—for World Cup debutantes Curaçao, using a recipe from Oprah.com. It’s a little bit of Holland, a little bit Caribbean, but where it really shined for me was as leftovers, where you could easily repurpose the filling for chopped cheese. For Ecuador, who I rate as dark horses this year, I made llapingachos—potato patties with a bit of achiote—and a nice peanut sauce. But the real winner here might have been Côte d’Ivoire and its maafe, a stew with chicken and ground nuts that’s popular across West Africa. It was a standout in the highly competitive braised poultry category; naturally, I left it on the stovetop overnight and had to toss the rest.

Group F

Many of the Netherlands’ greatest players have roots in Suriname, which in turn has deep ties to Java, so I made goedangan, a cabbage salad with coconut dressing. Japan’s oyakodon, another saucy chicken dish, did a job when it needed to. My wife chipped in (or intervened) to make shakshuka for Tunisia; whenever I have shakshuka, I think: “I should have shakshuka more often.” And then there was Sweden. As a gift this year, I got a copy of The Nordic Cookbook, an absolute doorstop of a treatise by Magnus Nilsson that includes recipes for pilot whale and fermented Greenland shark (definitely read the instructions closely for that one). I opted for the book’s more straightforward weeknight dish of nikkaluokta soppa, a.k.a. cabbage and ground beef soup. Perfect January fare, but I made it in May.

Group G

They do eat Brussels sprouts in Brussels, it turns out. In search of roughage, I opted for “Flemish-style” sprouts, sauteed in lots of butter. I don’t like these as much as I like Belgium’s Tintin jerseys, but they’ll do right by you. For Egypt, I made dukkah, a nuts-and-spices mixture with various interpretations. Mine came from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food: The Classic Cookbook, Expanded and Updated, with New Recipes and Contemporary Variations on Old Themes—an essential volume for Roden heads. I was unduly confident about making Samin Nosrat’s kuku sabzi for Iran because the process is similar to that of tortilla española. But there’s always a moment of hesitation, when you’re preparing to flip the puck, when you can envision the whole thing going horribly wrong, eggs and herbs ending up everywhere, a deep clean-up job, tears, apologies, a hasty search for delivery options. It turned out quite nicely, though. We spent a long time talking about making pavlova, because there was a recipe for it in the Bluey cookbook, and further research confirmed that it’s also eaten in New Zealand, but by this point, I was starting to grow wary of ambitious projects, and picked up fish and chips.

Group H

Uruguay has one food everyone talks about and it’s a sandwich called a chivito. I used to get it at a gas station in DC, but you can just make them. And then keep making them, for several days, because assembling the ingredients for even one means you end up with a ton of sliced steak, ham, bacon, and mozzarella. Most of what I know about Cape Verde is that there are lots of Cape Verdeans in southern New England, and lo if you search for the national dish—a hearty stew called cachupa—one of the first recipes comes from the University of Rhode Island. About 10,000 fans showed up to watch the national team play in Hartford in June and I think I made enough for all of them. Saudi Arabia was ably represented by chicken shawarma. For Spain, I made a tortilla española. (See above.) Versatile, filling, does what it says on the tin. 

Group I

If I had to put money on anyone to win this year—and I don’t, and won’t—I guess it would be France. And if I could only have one sandwich for the rest of my life…I’m not sure it would be a jambon-beurre, but I’d be hard-pressed to improve on it. Hot dogs in Norway are often wrapped in a potato flatbread called lefse, but I put them in flour tortillas and topped mine with potato salad, fried onions, and—in lieu of lingonberries—a black cherry jam. Senegal came through with coconut collard greens and butternut squash from Pierre Thiam’s Simply West African cookbook. FIFA may have expanded the tournament to make money, but Iraq’s participation, for the first time since 1986, does feel like one small point in favor of a 48-team tournament. I picked up some lahm bi ajeen—spiced meat and yogurt served on a doughy disc. It came in a pizza box. It’s always nice when something that isn’t pizza comes in a pizza box.

Group J

I made choripan for defending world champions Argentina. It’s a portmanteau of chorizo and pan. I don’t want to insult anyone by saying it “reminds me of what you get outside of Fenway,” because it’s very different—chimichurri, salsa criolla, etc.—but still: grilled sausage with peppers and onion in any variety will transport you to the sporting cathedral of your homeland. It just feels right. We needed vegetables again, so for Jordan, making its World Cup debut, I got fattoush from a Palestinian spot in my neighborhood, and for Algeria I made a nice cucumber salad with green bell peppers and mint. Austria was one of the stars of this gustatory competition, for the simple reason that we went to a restaurant called Werkstatt (fun to say) and got some schnitzel (also fun to say!) and rösti and a giant pretzel with an anchovy-infused cheese sauce. Very nice.

Group K

If the World Cup hadn’t expanded to 48 teams, I’d already have been done. But it did expand, and I was running out of time. So by this point in late May, I was cooking a lot less and getting a lot more takeout. Arguably this entire project was just a ploy to get food for Uzbekistan from Laghman Express, a Central Asian restaurant in south Brooklyn that also has a location in Atlanta. I have already made plans to get it again on Christmas. I picked up egg tarts for Portugal from a place in Brooklyn’s Chinatown, and they tasted like a sweet, eggy cloud. For Colombia I sourced an order of bandeja paisa—a platter with steak, chicharron, rice, and egg—and some papas criollas. The last time Democratic Republic of Congo was in the World Cup it was still called Zaire. I made poulet mayo, which is chicken cooked with mayonnaise, spices, peppers, and onions. It hit the spot.

Group L

I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant that only serves canapés, sort of like a Golden Corral for things you eat at weddings. We would not serve the exact mini empanadas I made for Panama, which were pulled from one of the first recipes that showed up when I searched “Panama + empanadas,” and looked vaguely like what a child might come back with if you asked them to draw the moon. But some other version might work. For Croatia we got burek again from the same place. Burek is shaping up to be a breakout star of this year’s World Cup; don’t mess with a good thing. For England, I got a bag of meat pies and pasties from Myers of Keswick in Greenwich Village. Is it coming home? Talk to me in July. But I’m definitely getting these again. For Ghana, I made kelewele—a dish of roasted plantains with an absolutely tremendous citrus, miso, and peanut butter marinade, topped with fried shallots for good measure. It was the last thing I made, with one day to spare before a family road trip that would take us out of pocket and away from our kitchen until the opening match. It might also have been the best.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump said that the US would strike Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT,” in a bid to “assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets.”

Trump made the statement in a Truth Social post, comparing the effort to the US military kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January and taking over the country’s multi-billion-dollar oil industry. 

The possible strikes come on the same day as the first two World Cup matches, the global soccer tournament organized by FIFA, a corrupt governing body, whose president awarded Trump the FIFA Peace Prize for his “unwavering commitment to advancing peace and unity.” Among the achievements FIFA cited: playing “a pivotal role” in establishing a ceasefire and promoting peace between Israel and Palestine.”

As I wrote in May, Trump has used his supposed success in Venezuela as fuel for subsequent takeovers attempts of Iran and Cuba. If he sees his legacy on the line—with both his and Israel’s war in Iran and the World Cup—the possible consequences look dire.

According to data from Iran’s government ministries, nearly 3,500 people have been killed since February 28, and, per a Wednesday report from the New York Times, the US military may have already hit two water facilities serving thousands of people in Iran (which many international law experts label as a war crime).