America the Beautiful (Terms and Conditions Apply)
Now, to be fair, let's give credit where credit is due.
This World Cup has (so far) been an absolute triumph, and by all accounts, the man claiming the credit is Donald J. Trump — in the sense that a hurricane is "responsible" for a beautiful rainbow that appears once it's finally moved on to trash another part of the country.
As we know, the World Cup has fallen in the middle of America’s 250th birthday, and those celebrations are the thing nobody in the West Wing wants to say out loud: the party is going great, despite the guy hosting it.
Millions of visitors have descended en masse on American towns and cities and discovered, to their genuine astonishment, that ordinary Americans are warm, funny, and thrilled to welcome them.
Despite Trump's best efforts, this discovery is so at odds with the international brand image cultivated over the past eighteen months of tariff tantrums, NATO insults, and vague talk of annexing Canada and Greenland that entire international newsrooms now file his daily announcements under the label "man bites dog."
The tournament has revealed that the country is "far more welcoming and complex" than its own government. (Except for the welcoming bit.) To the administration’s horror, the beautiful game has outperformed and continues to outperform the official 250th-birthday programming, which feels as if it were conceived by an event planner working from her bedroom in Boise, Idaho!
Speaking of programming, if you wanted a metaphor for the current administration, you could not have built a better one than the actual, non-metaphorical Reflecting Pool.
The White House, or should I say Trump, spent north of $14 million by contracting one of his Mar-a-Lago cronies to repaint the pool a fresh shade of "vanity blue," which was to mirror the surrounding monuments in time for the big birthday celebrations.
As we all know, it promptly grew algae and began to peel, and the President — a man who has never met a mirror he didn't like — announced that vandals, communists and, mainly, Democrats must be responsible, which led to an actual federal indictment of an ex-Olympic canoeist who had the audacity to put his hand in the water!
You simply cannot make this stuff up.
Then there was Mount Rushmore, where the President travelled, braving a vicious hailstorm to warn a modest South Dakota crowd that communism is now a greater threat to the republic than the Civil War, both World Wars, Pearl Harbour, and 9/11 combined — a claim that even made the granite busts above him seem to roll their eyes.
This was merely the appetiser.
The night before, Trump's own team of sycophants floated the idea of adding his face to the mountain. Trump, of course, thought it a splendid idea, and immediately posted a video of himself digitally chiselled in next to Lincoln.
The accompanying voiceover promised he would be "the greatest president for many, many years to come." Nothing reassures a republic, and quite frankly, the rest of the world, quite like its leader auditioning for a monument while still in office, or even alive, for that matter.
Now to the birthday party itself — 850,000 fireworks lit up the Washington sky, a number apparently selected purely to set a new Guinness World record (naturally). This colourful artillery show was launched in triple-digit heat so severe that the afternoon parade got cancelled, the "Great American State Fair" had to close early, and dozens of people were treated for heat stroke.
If that wasn’t enough, the President's own speech was delayed for hours by a thunderstorm that cleared the sparse National Mall. But, trooper that he is, he soldiered on, as neither weather nor common sense would be allowed to interrupt him. At close to midnight, the 250th-birthday speech finally took place — heavy on warnings about communism, undesirable immigrants and the Midterms. Unfortunately, the entire event was light on cake.
Meanwhile, over at the actual World Cup — you know, the one people are seriously enjoying — the USA’s breakout star and Golden Boot contender is Folarin Balogun, who has been terrorising opposing defences throughout the tournament.
Balogun is American purely by accident: his Nigerian mother was seven months pregnant and was denied a flight home, so he was born in Brooklyn instead of London.
Under the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship clause — the very provision this administration has spent over a year in court trying to gut — citizenship was automatically granted to him. The irony is that that unplanned layover is the sole reason America has a red-hot football star, whose talent rests on a legal technicality the President would prefer didn't apply.
Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, the Supreme Court's ruling on the birthright matter landed slap-bang in the middle of the tournament. In a way, one could not ask the universe for a cleaner punchline.
None of this is to say the President's fans see it this way — plenty of die-hard Republicans will tell you, verbatim, that the country’s economy is booming, the ratings are the highest they’ve ever been, and the "biggest fireworks show in history" will be remembered as one of Trump’s crowning glories. Oh, and that speech on communism at Mt. Rushmore? It’s patriotism, not paranoia.
Still, if you're looking for the country's true soul this summer, you won’t find it on the algae-flecked Reflecting Pool or carved into a mountain. It's in the stands, with American fans singing badly in six languages, cheering for a Brooklyn-born son of Nigerian immigrants who almost wasn't eligible to play for the team he's currently carrying.
America, it turns out, is at its best exactly when nobody in charge is trying too hard to stage it.
Paul v Walters is a writer living on the island of Bali. Apart from his numerous novels and an anthology of short stories, he is a prolific travel writer. His latest offering, RITUAL, was launched at the recent International Ubud Readers & Writers Festival.
