Megan Rapinoe's take on the USMNT's World Cup exit is blunt: they had something going, and then Donald Trump got involved.
Speaking on The Daily Show, the two-time Women's World Cup winner argued that Trump's intervention in the Folarin Balogun red card controversy — which included a direct call to FIFA President Gianni Infantino — didn't rally the team. It rattled them.
"They had, like, such a good vibe," Rapinoe said. "I feel like they had, like, the underdog kind of vibe going. And then you-know-who got involved, and everyone was like, nope. No. We don't like it. And then, obviously, Belgium was like, 'No, we absolutely can't lose to this team now.'"
Balogun confirmed the noise was real
The USMNT eventually lost to Belgium in the Round of 16, and Balogun himself admitted the situation got into his head. "The closer we got to the game, I tried to just focus as best as I could, but it was difficult. A lot of outside noise and that's hard to avoid," he told CBS in mid-July.
That's a telling admission. You don't often get players openly acknowledging that external chaos affected their performance. The red card was controversial enough on its own — adding a sitting president publicly lobbying FIFA on its review turned a sporting dispute into a political spectacle, and the squad had no older leaders equipped to absorb that kind of pressure.
Rapinoe expanded on that point on her podcast: "Not only does this team not have a core of older players who are used to that, but none of these players talk about anything ever, like for the most part." A young, tight-lipped squad dropped into a media firestorm isn't exactly a recipe for focus.
The White House sees it differently
Predictably, the Trump administration pushed back hard. White House spokesman Davis Ingle credited the president with delivering "one of the greatest and most successful sporting events in history," pointing to billions in revenue and smooth logistics across host cities.
That's not wrong, exactly — the tournament infrastructure was a genuine success. But tournament logistics and locker room psychology are two different things. Rapinoe's argument isn't about whether the World Cup ran well. It's about whether a president's fingerprints on a red card review helped or hurt a group of players already carrying the weight of a host nation's expectations.
Balogun's own words suggest the answer wasn't nothing.
