Trump Lost the Culture, and the Country Celebrates Without Him

The self proclaimed sports president is everywhere and nowhere welcome anymore. Booed at the NBA Finals, failing with his cage spectacle on the lawn of the White House, he now watches a World Cup in which the country embraces exactly the foreigners his program casts as enemies.

Have you seen Donald Trump lately? Maybe trying to present his unfinished Iran deal as something other than complete capitulation, or asleep in the Oval Office. Maybe you heard him talking about how good the leaders of India and Egypt looked. But most often he has been seen at sporting events.

The self proclaimed sports president was everywhere, especially at the third game of the Knicks against the Spurs in New York, where he became the first president to attend an NBA Finals game, and at the UFC fights on the lawn of the White House. On July nineteenth he will be in New Jersey to hand the World Cup trophy to the victorious American captain Tim Ream, or perhaps to the captain of another nation. Sports, especially combat sports and football, have always served his project, and never more than in this second term. They are meant to present him as he wants to be seen, not merely as a simple man among the ordinary men who carry him, but as a power that commands culture itself. He appears where presidents previously did not appear, and the appearances are arranged so that the applause reaches its highest pitch. Hence the cage fights and the Army-Navy games.

One thing stands in the way. The ordinary people in the stands do not like him anymore, worn down by a destructive agenda and by the economic wreckage of his trade war and his war with Iran. Instead of a president at the height of his power, the past week showed a weakened man losing not only power but culture itself.

On Monday, June 9, he came to the Finals and was met with a wall of boos. He drained the atmosphere from the evening, and the Knicks suffered their only loss since April. On Wednesday, with the air cleansed by New Yorkers burning sage and by a halftime performance from the Wu-Tang Clan, the team pulled off the greatest comeback in Finals history, something that had seemed impossible as long as he was in the building. On June 13, they won their first title since 1973, and the city poured into the streets, hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, cheering and embracing one another.

He wanted to stage his own triumph on Sunday, June 14, during an elaborate celebration of his eightieth birthday organized by the UFC. It took place inside a huge, glaring cage on the lawn of the White House, where four thousand members of the economic and political elite watched while the real fans had to remain far outside the security perimeter surrounding the building. It went wrong in almost every way, slowed by rain, thin on major fights, a damp event remembered above all for one fighter who hurled a transphobic insult at former First Lady Michelle Obama. The night before, his hometown had held the real celebration, and that one did not need a cage.

The good feeling never stopped. Dozens of American cities welcomed tens of thousands of visitors from around the world for the 2026 World Cup, and the hosts greeted them with open arms. In Lawrence, Kansas, the crowd welcomed the Algerian team with a chant borrowed from the university’s battle cry and a band that had learned the Algerian anthem. In Boston and Rhode Island, people welcomed Scottish supporters and shared their beer until, as the story goes, the bars ran dry. In New York, supporters of Senegal and Morocco, and also Brazil, were absorbed into the local crowds. Americans, it turns out, enjoy hosting the world and giving it a good time, in Dallas and Los Angeles, and in Kansas City too, and the whole thing contradicts his program line by line.

So the idea of the sports president is wrong at its core. Nobody can truly enjoy themselves while he is nearby. In Madison Square Garden he looked visibly bored, and he fell asleep. The cultural pull that seemed to shift in his direction in November 2024, when his dance at college football games and men’s national team matches was everywhere, is gone. He wanted to stand inside the greatest sporting memory of this city and nearly ruined it for everyone, and that spoiling of the atmosphere will forever become part of Knicks history. His birthday in the cage was a failure. Next month he will try and fail to ruin a World Cup that he has attempted to stain with everything he has and still has not managed to destroy.

When he presents the trophy to the winner, he will be booed. And then the boos will fade, not because he won anyone over, but because the crowd will simply return to what it had been doing before he shuffled into the picture, enjoying itself. That contains the full measure of the man. He can summon cameras and fill the stands with loyalists. He draws the security perimeter around himself, and still he cannot make a single room happy that he is there. Power can make itself unavoidable. It cannot make itself wanted, and culture in the end is nothing more than the sum of what people love when nobody forces them to. He has the first. He lost the second. And the difference is the boo that disappears the moment he turns to leave.