Considering he’s the self-declared hardest working president to ever hold the office, Donald Trump has spent a remarkable amount of the past year on down time. In 2025, he loomed over sports like no American politician before him, his visits to stadiums and arenas and golf courses and race tracks so frequent they began to feel like part of the job. But if Trump’s presence on the sporting scene has seemed hard to escape, gird yourselves for 2026, when the American presidency no longer merely intersects with sport but threatens to subsume it. The World Cup is on the way, the Olympics are right behind it, a UFC card is coming to the White House lawn (not a joke) and the commander-in-chief’s well-documented fondness for jumbotrons is becoming less of a habit than a dependency.
Trump’s grand tour sportif began less than three weeks after his second inauguration, when he become the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl. One week later he was at the Daytona 500, where Air Force One buzzed the speedway on arrival before his armored limousine, “The Beast”, paced the field for a couple of ceremonial laps.
Trump led the field in a couple of pace laps at the Daytona 500 in February.
There were the NCAA wrestling championships in Philadelphia and the UFC cards in Miami and New Jersey, where his rapturous receptions were covered by Fox News for days; the Fifa Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium, where he remained center stage for Chelsea’s trophy lift, a refusal to cede space that felt less like ignorance of protocol than an animal assertion of dominance; the Ryder Cup at Bethpage, where his hyper-jingoistic reception presaged a total breakdown in public behavior; a LIV Golf event at his own Doral resort; the US Open men’s final, where the United States Tennis Association asked broadcasters to censor protests or reaction to his appearance.
By the time he surfaced at Tigers-Yankees in the Bronx, Lions-Commanders in Landover and the Army-Navy game in Baltimore, it was clear the president’s sporting crawl was not leisure but something more coordinated. Still, nothing could prepare us for Trump’s appearance at the World Cup draw, where he was awarded Fifa’s Peace Prize in a ceremony that delivered a coup de grace to what remained of parody.
Trump uses these appearances the way politicians once used county fairs and parades: as staged demonstrations of relevance, engineered for cameras and social feeds. The walk-ins are rallies distilled to their most efficient form. Thirty seconds of visibility is enough to saturate feeds, boosted reflexively by sports accounts, political reporters, celebrities, supporters and detractors alike. The reaction itself barely matters. Trump traffics in “heat”, the age-old pro-wrestling metric that collapses cheers and boos into the same currency. He chooses arenas that lean his way, or venues where displays of dissent can be caricatured as elitist and unserious. Being cheered at a Nascar race or UFC card flatters his strength. Being jeered at somewhere like the US Open, by patrons at paying $23 for vodka-lemonades, serves the same purpose. None of this feels aberrant in a country where political coverage has fully absorbed the grammar of Monday Night Football: spectacle over substance, momentum over meaning, constant motion and zero reflection.
Sport has long been a favored instrument of strongmen, a means of laundering legitimacy, prestige and international standing through spectacle. Tyrants as far back as Peisistratus of Athens sponsored athletes and infrastructure to naturalize their rule at the ancient Olympics, while Roman emperors from Augustus to Trajan to Commodus bound personal authority to public games as displays of power, generosity and divine sanction. The playbook has proven durable. Mussolini used the 1934 World Cup to present fascism as disciplined, modern and triumphant, with Italy’s national team folded seamlessly into the regime’s propaganda. Hitler’s vast investment in architecture, pageantry and media at the 1936 Berlin Olympics served the same end, staging Nazi Germany as peaceful, advanced and legitimate. Franco’s embrace of Real Madrid’s European dominance in the 1950s and 60s functioned as soft-power rehabilitation after civil war and diplomatic isolation. Mobutu Sese Seko, Mohammed bin Salman, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and countless others … same soup, different bowl.
But as any exhausted observer of the Trump ecosystem knows, none of this is really about the crowd. The real business happens backstage, where commissioners, promoters, broadcasters and owners mingle in a lightly perfumed donor sauna. Trump treats these events as networking chambers, places where alliances are forged that flatter his vanity and serve his political ambitions in equal measure. (The Rolex suite at the US Open certainly appeared to operate as soft diplomacy: Switzerland’s 39% tariff problem eased soon after, with a gold Rolex clock later appearing on the Resolute desk.)
Grinning photo-ops with Yankees star Aaron Judge and YouTube walk-ons with Bryson DeChambeau become content, currency and campaign messaging all at once, collected with the zeal of a child filling a Panini album. But it is whales like Miriam Adelson – the majority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, who poured roughly $100m into Trump’s re-election campaign and has glibly pledged another $250m if he seeks a third term in 2028 – who really butter his bread.
Trump elbowed his way into Chelsea’s Club World Cup celebration at MetLife Stadium in July.
But beneath the theatrics is something more pragmatic. Sport, in the Trump imagination, is the great pipeline of Americana. And he’s shown how even sporting conversations on the margins can be turned into political accelerants. During the 2024 campaign, he elevated the niche question of transgender participation in women’s sports into a full-blown cultural wedge, using it to galvanize his conservative base and funnel wider anxieties about gender and social change into a single, emotive grievance. In an election decided on a knife-edge, it functioned much like gay marriage in Bush v Kerry two decades earlier: not a dominant policy issue, but a turnout driver potent enough to shape the result. That strategy has carried into his second term, a reminder of how sport can be repurposed as a proxy battlefield in America’s culture wars.
All of which brings us to the year ahead, and the grim knowledge that 2025 was merely a dress rehearsal. In 2026 the United States will host the men’s World Cup, a month-long global festival that Trump will aim to co-opt for the international validation he’s long craved. He has already laid claim to the footballing spotlight through his endlessly reciprocated bromance with Infantino, the only world sports leader who treats Trump not as a diplomatic inconvenience but as a kind of visiting archangel. Of course the football will take a backseat on the World Cup’s fourth day, when Trump will fete his 80th birthday from a VIP box at the UFC card to be held on the White House’s South Lawn.
The truth is that sport, in its current hyper-politicized and hyper-commodified form, is exquisitely suited to Trump’s needs. It supplies the crowds, the cameras, the ritual patriotism and the ready-made mythologies of strength and struggle. It gives him stadiums and arenas that can be turned into instant rallies and backstage corridors that double as donor gatherings. It offers him a role he prefers to the one described in the constitution: not head of the executive branch, but ringmaster-in-chief.
And so the man will keep appearing, a recurring character in the American sporting dreamscape, impossible to edit out of the footage, unbowed by the boos, delighted by the cheers, and constitutionally incapable of declining the opportunity to preen on another jumbotron. Sport gives Trump everything he wants. Next year, he will take even more.
