‘EMBARRASSING for us’： MS NOW reacts to Trump’s behavior at World Cup final ｜ COMPILATION

Spain is a wasted cause. We don't want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I'd like you to cut it off. Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don't participate. They don't pay. I don't want anything to do with Spain. They're hopeless. They're bad people because, you know, they have everybody else going and paying and working. In particular, Spain. There are a couple of others, but in particular, Spain. The day when the American president called everyone in Spain, quote, bad people. Hi again, everyone. It's now five o'clock in the east. In Donald Trump's world, one day you're calling an entire nation, an American ally, hopeless and full of, quote, bad people. And the next, you're trying to squeeze into their spotlight as they celebrate the biggest prize in sports, winning the World Cup. At yesterday's final match, just 11 days after Donald Trump said those hideous things about Spain and NATO that do not represent the views of most Americans. Trump represented America again, this time to present them, the winning Spanish team, with the World Cup trophy. He shook some players' hands and then awkwardly refused to leave their stage. FIFA president Gianni Infantino had to rush over to him and push him off the stage, literally and physically, to let the Spanish team have their moment. Minutes earlier, Trump and Infantino had walked out to the field to a sustained chorus of boos, according to the White House press pool reporters, which described the ambient crowd noise level at 78 decibels, getting up to 84 with all the booing. The entire ordeal was classic Donald Trump, an attempt to hog the spotlight in an event he had already unsuccessfully and unnecessarily inserted himself into. A few weeks prior, Trump called Infantino after a player on the U.S. team, Flo Balogun, received a red card and a one game suspension, asking FIFA to review it. Trump said he didn't tell Infantino what to do, but FIFA did later rescind the suspension for the player. Balogun acknowledged after the United States' defeat that the, quote, outside noise over the reversal made the next match, quote, difficult. So yesterday's moment on the World Cup stage was also telling for what it showed about the people around Donald Trump, those who appease him. We've seen time and time and time again that anyone and any institution that bends the knee to Donald Trump ends up with a good amount of egg on their face. It's just a matter of time. The Washington Post writes about Trump and Infantino this way, quote, their relationship had been conspicuous for years. Infantino had repeatedly appeared with Trump. FIFA rented office space in Trump Tower, and Trump has kept a model of the World Cup trophy near the Resolute desk. The World Cup draw was moved to Washington at Trump's urging, bringing one of the tournament's signature pre-event ceremonies to the Kennedy Center. At that event, Infantino presented Donald Trump with FIFA's inaugural Peace Prize, an honor with a murky selection process that was derided by critics and human rights activists as another sign of FIFA's willingness to flatter the American president, whose government it needed as a partner. And what did the FIFA president end up with in return? Having to literally shoo a man off the stage at an event that he tried to make all about himself. Donald Trump's embarrassment of the United States of America on the World Cup stage is where we begin the hour with Pulitzer Prize winning host of the podcast Pablo Torrey Finds Out, contributor Pablo Torrey, also joining us, national sports columnist, professor of journalism at the University of Maryland. Kevin Blackstone is here. Pablo, since you and I talked a little bit about the World Cup, tell me your thoughts, what went through your head as you watched this yesterday. Yeah, I watched this live and replayed it a number of times, I will admit, wondering if this was perhaps worthy of a generous interpretation and that generosity would have led to some, I think, accusation of outright senility. This, if this is innocent, is something that you would have made fun of, Mr. President, with Joe Biden, right? You don't know where you are. You're lost somehow on the most grand stage on the planet. That's the generous read. The less generous read is, I think, probably for better and for worse, more appropriate, which is this is somebody who did not care about whose moment this was and Nicole is that it's always his moment. And so do you like this soccer? Do you like what the American experience has been when it came to the literal moment at which the gold trophy is lifted? Because, of course, all gold trophies belong to Donald Trump. Kevin, your thoughts as you watch this go down yesterday? Well, oddly, I thought it was befitting, right? It bookended this particular World Cup. It started with Donald Trump's embarrassments and with Giano Infantino's embarrassments. As I said, corruption respects corruption, and it did. And so this World Cup, all in the middle, there were question marks about things that were going on. You mentioned Bolligan getting the red card, Donald Trump making a phone call to Infantino, and miraculously, the red card goes away. England suffered the same with a defender. They didn't get to make a phone call, and their red card stayed intact. We've talked about what happened to so many of the people that wanted to come here to either work for FIFA as a referee who got turned away because of his nationality, the great fan for the Congo who wasn't allowed to come here and do his thing in the stands because this country wouldn't honor a visa for him, the fans that could no longer afford to go to a World Cup in this country. And then you see the end where Donald Trump makes a mockery out of what should have been a great moment for Spain and a great moment for the people who love this particular game. The beautiful game was turned into an ugly game. You know, Pablo, it's not something we can measure for, but Spain is a proud country. They love, they love, love, love competition and sports. And 11 days ago, Trump called all the Spanish people, quote, bad people. What sort of intangible impact does an attack from an American president have on a country and how they're sort of proud as sports team performs on the world stage? Yeah, I just think it's, you know, they call it in baseball, as you know, Nicole, they call it Bush League. It feels like minor league stuff. You know, it makes us look small. And I want to point this out because there was another piece of writing that I wanted to cite here because it was in The Guardian over the last several days that the vice president of U.S. soccer put a name to it that I think I should just quote because you raised the question that he provides an answer to. And he says, while the World Cup will go down as a massive commercial success, no amount of revenue will ever erase the moral stain of blessing Trump's wars in the name of soccer. This was the vice president of U.S. soccer writing in The Guardian, someone who has been fed up watching the commandeering of his sport and the U.S. national team program by a who does not actually care about the game. And so what does it mean for Spain to have been insulted on the world stage and then to be now around this again, generously senile old man who was trying to be in literally the team photo? I think it's just embarrassing for us, you know, and that's what U.S. soccer's vice president there was was basically referring to in so many words. Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. Donald Trump has provided the country with another just unbelievable script split screen this weekend. The president of the United States, the first ever FIFA Peace Prize recipient, yucking it up, partying at the World Cup finals while the war he started with Iran and then restarted faces one of the worst weeks yet and threatens to spiral out of control. Now, for Trump this weekend, all eyes were on the goal as he and his family seemed to have a grand old time amid the backdrop of even more U.S. troops killed under his watch pursuing his war. The army has identified two of the American soldiers killed in action over the weekend. Private Isabella Gonzalez of Texas was just 19 years old. First Lieutenant Tyler James Feehan of Hawaii was 25. Both were killed when Iran struck a military base in Jordan, which maintains a large footprint from American forces and serves as a key hub for U.S. airstrikes in Iran. A third soldier died in Iraq in an unrelated incident that involved a downed Iranian drone, which brings the total of Americans who have died in this war to 17. That we know of. As The New York Times reports today, Trump's Pentagon has withheld information about dozens of injuries related to the ongoing Iran war. Pete Hegg says Department of Defense is obsessed with a culture of winning total domination. Any information contrary to that Those attacks not only injured dozens of U.S. service members, they also damaged several helicopters. But the Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted. In response, a U.S. military official told The Times, Central Command is not required to release information about injured service members, especially when they quickly return to duty. I guess the government doesn't think you need to know about the service members being injured ostensibly on your behalf in a war being fought with your tax dollars and in your name. And there's been reporting for months across all fronts of this war from many different sources that the fundamental situation, the balance of power, is not nearly as rosy as the administration is constantly telling us. That the U.S. and Israel, for example, are running critically low on missile interceptors because we were just completely unprepared for the reality of the war and now its duration. To that last point, it is not even clear if Trump is aware of that reality. No, really, listen to this, The Washington Post reporting, according to a single U.S. official granted anonymity, quote, we do not have enough munitions to safely sustain operations, and I don't think the White House is aware of that. I hope so, and the White House is at least reading The Washington Post. Meanwhile, over the past several months, thousands of people, thousands of people are dead across both Iran and Lebanon and in Israel, including civilians. They are apparently not a consideration at all for this White House, which, lest we forget, bombed a girls' elementary school as one of the war's first acts. The Yemeni militant group, the Houthis, are also now escalating. They just announced a blockade of the Red Sea from Saudi Arabian oil. Should they go ahead and fully close the Bob El-Mandeb Strait, that could reduce the global oil supply by seven percent. That, of course, on top of about the 10 percent that flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which means everything is sitting on a nice edge in the Middle East right now. Here at home, the second order affects the war returning fast because oil is not moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices are creeping back up. National average back over four bucks a gallon as our strategic reserves here in the U.S. are down to their lowest level since the Reagan administration. This was a story that kind of flew on the radar a bit, but we were using that strategic reserve to sort of float oil prices down. And it's not clear at all that China and Japan will bail us out this time with their own much larger than expected reserves and China's drastic reduction to imports that it was able to pull off during the first phase of the war, which really did save Donald Trump and American gas consumers bacon. Now, throughout all of this, you've got the commander in chief. I don't know what you can see. I mean, asleep at the wheel, not always asleep. Sometimes he's awake and when he's awake, he's mostly plotting and ranting about sabotaging our free and fair elections so that he can rig it for the Republican Party or alternately publicly obsessing over things like the font choice and the tiles for all his little redecorating projects. Trump transparently does not care and can't even bother to pretend to anymore. That's the reality. The only reason he even seemingly bothered to comment on those deceased soldiers is because a little watch news outlet had to call him up and force him to address it. We hadn't heard from the president yet about these deaths, so we decided to call him to see if he had a reaction. And that was the first thing I asked him what his reaction was to the news of these two U.S. service members that were killed in Iranian attacks yesterday. The president telling me he finds it very sad. He says it's a very sad thing. We hate to see it happen. But then the president told me it's in service to our country. We're never they're never going to allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Again, I grow tired of pointing this out, but I feel duty bound to do it. A year ago during the bombing of Iran, he said the program had been obliterated, and anyone who questioned it being obliterated was essentially disloyal and treasonous. Now, Trump started this war, this version of it this year, in part because the Israeli government convinced him to. And then he got bored pretty quickly, as he does with all of his actual president. Remember, he did his little prerecorded video in the middle of the night with the baseball hat. That was that. And then he went back to doing what he'd much rather do, flying back to New York to hang out with the World Cup finals. That's why this guy is in it. Now, I wouldn't say it was a warm reception from the crowd, as you can hear there. Lots of people posted videos of what sure sounds like booing. After all, Trump gets booed at basically every sporting event he attends. I was in the garden on game three, and it was deafening how loud he got booed. This video comes from NBC News White House correspondent Monica Alba. What does it sound like to you? For one local report, security at MetLife Stadium confiscated thousands of red cards that fans were going to waive to mock the president's corruption. Of course, he calling the head of FIFA to get a red card revoked on an American player. Patrons say the cards were taken when security learned they were actually part of an anti-Trump protest. And as for the game, the Trump curse struck again when Argentina, the team he clearly preferred from a country with a Trump sycophant and buddy as president, got shut out and lost. But, you know, the man was clearly just thrilled with all the attention anyway, right? That's what keeps him going. Just look at him soaking up all the glory with the champion Spanish team who actually accomplished something. Why is he why is he on stage? Why is he there? It's it's so cringy. He appears to be trying to photobomb their team picture after they've done something very impressive. He was pulled aside by FIFA president Gianni Infantino. The Guardian put it in a truly legendary photo caption, quote, Gianni Infantino carefully explains to President Trump that he is not part of the Spanish national team. Trump also weirdly, grossly inserted himself in the actual process of handing out the World Cup trophy. Look, look how he hide the thing like you just like looks like he wants it for himself. And all of this would pair well with the ridiculous FIFA Peace Prize. The organization made him a kind of participation trophy after he didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize and was super bummed out about it. And then, you know, just over two months after receiving that peace prize, he started a regime change war of choice in Iran that everyone warned would be disastrous. And now here we are, a war that continues to this day, leaving thousands dead, injured, displaced. That's left American service members, families grieving and has left Trump utterly and completely unbothered. Joining me now, Emma Snow's Ayman Mohedin, I get that he thought this was one of the signature events of his term in office. Just let the Spanish have it. Just let them enjoy. There's no way that Donald Trump can be surrounded by a bunch of young, successful, attractive, highly accomplished men and athletes and not want to be a part of their success story. And by the way, this wasn't the first time Donald Trump did this, right? Literally a year ago during this same similar tournament, the FIFA Club World Cup, when Chelsea won, they went through this same kind of ceremony where Chelsea had just won the World Cup, Donald Trump goes on stage, hand the trophy, you're supposed to leave, let the players enjoy this moment. Nobody's supposed to be on that stage except the players and the coach, not even the medical staff, not even the technical staff, not even some of the assistant managers. And Donald Trump injects himself in there and awkwardly stands there knowing that he's not supposed to be there. So much so that even the president of FIFA, Infantino, who has done this a few times, tried to suggest to him, hey, you should be exiting stage right. He doesn't. He tries to stand in the middle of that picture and steal the thunder of the Spanish players. And look, like I said, the idea of Donald Trump being, as The Washington Post said, being showered with gold confetti and being surrounded by all these highly accomplished, very successful athletes is probably something he wanted for the image and being part of that success. Let's talk about one of those successful athletes on the Spanish team, Borja Iglesias. He said he would only shake Trump's hand to avoid prison. He hoped it would be over very quickly. How much did the president's feud with Spain's president just linger over all of this? Big time. You know, the athletes were asked about it. The soccer players were asked about it, as you mentioned there. Look, the Spanish athletes are a reflection of their country just the same way American athletes are and others. So they come in all different kind of political views and stuff. But some of the Spanish players have been very outspoken, not just about the United States, but about foreign policy, about war, about the genocide in Gaza. Many of them have expressed their views about it, and they understand America's role in all of these global issues. And as you mentioned, there's been this feud between the prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, and the United States. And the words of President Trump certainly reverberated around Spanish media. A lot of Spanish media covered Trump's comments about Spain being very bad people, criticizing the country, threatening the country with more tariff wars or trade wars. So that was not lost on the players who were playing here in the United States. And then on top of that, you had some Spanish athletes, former Spanish team players, who were denied entry into the United States. One of the former World Cup winners of Spain's 2010 team was denied entry into the United States because he participated in a soccer game in Iran. And so his ESTA visa, or his ability to enter the United States, was denied. And he appealed to Donald Trump and to the American administration to let him into the country so that he could be here with his teammates and celebrate. And he was granted that. So the politics between what the United States has done towards Spain and the tensions around this World Cup were not lost on these Spanish players as they were lifting that trophy and making these types of comments in the run-up. Of course, athletes are going to be asked about their politics and their worldviews. And so I think for a lot of the athletes, like we heard it was not lost on them that they were playing in this climate, that it was Donald Trump who's going to present this trophy. And he's had very harsh words towards the Spanish government. I have less than a minute left, but I just want to say the president was also with PM of Canada, Mark Carney. And he told him, you've got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air. Maybe they should pay us some damages or something. We should do some tariffs. As if Donald Trump doesn't know how forest fires happen and that they're part of things that happen in this country. And again, it's the way that Donald Trump approaches geopolitics and also personal relationships. It's a sporting event the world is trying to celebrate. And Donald Trump is using the stage to his own personal advantage, but also this kind of retribution that anything that happens outside the world that could potentially be harmful to the United States, he wants the exact price for it. And it's just not the spirit of the tournament. It's not the cordiality that is often afforded to world leaders who are coming here to participate in this. Canada was a host of the World Cup, like the United States was, like Mexico was. And so the idea that you would use this stage and also at the same time use that kind of rhetoric against your neighbor, I think it just speaks to the character of who Donald Trump is. David Muhedina, it's always so good to have you. Thank you so much. They know Donald Trump in New Jersey, where this World Cup match had the booze raining down when he walked out with FIFA's president. When Spain was celebrating its victory, you could see Trump sort of lingering on stage, Australian broadcasters also discussing whether he'd stay in the photos. In 2026, the champions of the world are Spain. Is now, so they can edit him out of that. They can edit him out of that. That's real-time commentary. And it happened, as Forbes reported. The FIFA World account posted this shot where, if you look closely, you can see the leader of the free world's right arm getting cropped. Now, Trump's unpopularity abroad is well known. But again, this was a match held, and the booze you hear are inside the United States. His approval stuck in the 30s over the we were covering at the top of the show, the economy and other failures. Republicans close to the operation say it's time to make the midterms a kind of, quote, hate election. Republicans admit Axios reports the midterm forecast is bleak. But if they can just make voters hate Dems more than Republicans, maybe the losses won't be as bad. I want to bring in a special guest. Brian Tyler Cohn is the host of the No Lie podcast, which has billions of views online. He's interviewed all kinds of heavyweights across the Democratic Party, including that rare get in American politics, a recent sit down with former President Obama. We've seen the devolution of the discourse. How do we come back from a place that we have fallen into? Well, first of all, I think it's important to recognize that the majority of the American people find this behavior deeply troubling. You know, it is true that it gets attention. It's true that it's a distraction. Cohen is also the author of the new book The Day After How to Wield Power in a Post Trump World. You can get that right now wherever books are sold. Brian is one of these new voices that we've been listening to. As you know, the world keeps evolving. Welcome back. All right. Thanks for having me. Yeah. The top story here relates to your book. So reading from a passage, you talk about how before 2024, this duality that Bill Clinton had discussed, strong and wrong was beating weak and right. You say you could say that demonizing opposition is bad for the country, but you can't say it's worse than Trump's presidency. The truth is Republicans have been playing the long game. Dems playing the wrong game. Bars, Brian. And you go on to write, why are Dems so far behind with this kind of politics? It works. Look at two times Dems did play hardball. You point to 96 in 2012, where the campaigns really did diminish their opponents sailing to victory rather than the talk we've heard so often about going high. How does that apply today when we see these reports, everything from abuse of power, revenge indictments, ice at the polls to a propaganda campaign that Axios reports would be just about hating Dems? Well, look, they have run that playbook over and over and over again. And largely it's been successful. I mean, how many elections can you remember, Ari, where Republicans had deferred to this idea of migrant caravans or demonizing gay people or trans people, as was the case in this latest election? There's always some minority to punch down on, always some scapegoat. That's the problem. That's the cause of all of our woes, as opposed to the people who are actually causing a lot of the problems in this country, who in large part are the millionaires and billionaires who benefit from the policies of this administration. It is notable that you have Republicans who continuously run on punching down on these small minorities. But at the same time, the first thing they do is pass tax cuts, for example, that heap favor, heap benefits onto the wealthiest Americans in this country as we see income inequality explode. And by the way, Republicans know that this is potent. That's why they run on it. But the problem is when they get into office, they never actually deliver on any of those things. It's always about finding some small minority to beat down on as the cause of all of our nation's problems. What are the issues that you think currently work best against Trump? The issues that currently work best against Trump? Well, I mean, his blatant corruption and his inability, unwillingness to deliver on the very things that he promised on the campaign trail. Both of those things in concert, I think, tell a really clear story about who this president is working for, which would be bad enough unto itself, but even worse, given the fact that this is somebody who came into office on this pretext that he was going to focus on the little guy. It was him who decided to run an America first campaign. And really, the only person that stood to benefit from this is not the 350 million people in this country. It's Donald Trump himself. He's the one who's tripled his net worth. He's the one who's encrusting the Oval Office in gold, building himself a monument in the form of a ballroom and maybe a triumphal arch, who's gotten a new airplane out of this that's going to, of course, go to him after he's out of office. And so, again, the person who stands to benefit from all of Trump's priorities as we see costs rise, as we see health care gutted, as we see food assistance gutted, as we see gas prices rise, is only one guy. It's Trump. What do you see in the early primaries, which, of course, are just a smattering, and this conversation about generational change? We follow this now across two elderly presidents, an elderly Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell, mystery about his health status. But I think we'd all be fair to note it's a problem in both parties and across every branch of government. How much of that does that account for some of the energy behind younger Democratic candidates? I think that's a huge driver of the future of the Democratic Party. I mean, there's no doubt, as you mentioned rightfully, that gerontocracy is a problem in this country. My generation, millennials, have largely been locked out of power forever. And frankly, some of the millennials that are getting into office now are the most popular politicians in America, whether it's Zoran Mamdani in New York, whether it's AOC also in New York, whether it's John Ossoff down in Georgia. This is what happens when you actually make a bridge to the next generation and allow people who are more charismatic, more dynamic, more articulate, more tech savvy to have their spot in the spotlight, have their chance in the spotlight to actually show what they can do. And so I think this should be a blinking red light to existing members of the Democratic caucus, that if you stand for the things that you claim to stand for, make way for people who are going to be more effective arbiters, more effective shepherds of that exact message, because the people who are seeing popularity, the people who are able to better relate to the electorate, are those younger people who've grown up in these ecosystems where the vast majority of Americans are already getting their news. Yeah. And then you could be a great shepherd and still eventually say, it's time to have a shepherd's retirement. Let somebody else out on the hills, you know. Brian, as mentioned, a lot of folks know you online. Folks know you from the Obama interview to our viewers. We appreciate you coming back and that book if you want to learn more about what Brian's saying is The Day After, How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World. You can Google that or get it wherever books are sold.