Americanswers! Was the 2026 World Cup a success for Donald Trump?

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1:01Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a big day in UK politics today. There is a new Prime Minister. I know, I know we have had this in the past, in the recent past, but Matt Chorley at least is excited, so is otherwise engaged. But America Answers continues at the worldwide headquarters and we're answering your questions as ever today. And there is a wide range of questions as ever as well. So, for instance, is the situation in Iran starting to look like a forever war? You remember those are the wars that Donald Trump promised not to have. And indeed, whether the US is running out of options to end the war.

1:39Plus, of course, the World Cup finishing on Sunday. In the build-up, we asked if it was the most controversial in history. What is the verdict now that it has all finished? We will be talking through those and plenty of other questions as well. Welcome to America Answers.

1:56americast americast from bbc news you hear that sound oh i think when i hear that sound it reminds me of money we didn't start this war but under president trump we are finishing it this is a big cover-up and this administration is engaged in it this guy has trump arrangement syndrome i have four words for you turn the volume up

2:22Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau. And it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England. And it is Marianna sitting next to Justin in the worldwide headquarters. And let us get straight to questions. And the first one comes from Michael in Hampshire, who asks us via email, how are Trumpians and other Americans seeing the war with Iran? Surely it now qualifies as a never-ending war. Sarah, that is true actually, isn't it? Or at least there isn't currently on the stocks an obvious way of them ending it. Yeah, exactly. These are the wars that Donald Trump railed against when he was campaigning for the presidency, saying that he wouldn't get embroiled in any more forever wars or never-ending wars.

3:06And although what's happening around has been going on for about five months now, which isn't the five years that a lot of these other conflicts have gone on for, it does have the feeling that it's getting entrenched and there is no obvious end in sight. And so this is the point at which you would assume even some of Donald Trump's most loyal supporters would be revolting about this. And certainly in the kind of influencer sphere and commentators are very angry and upset with the president about it. But not all of the base, I would say. I had a fascinating trip just a couple of weeks ago to South Dakota.

3:39And we went to Mount Rushmore because Donald Trump was visiting there. But mostly I was just trying to speak to Americans who'd come from all over the country to visit Mount Rushmore. And I met a lot of Republicans who were in full support of what Donald Trump was doing in Iran. Firstly, they said he wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't necessary. So their belief in him was such that if he thinks it's the right thing to do, he can contradict any campaign promises that he made because they believe in him more than they believe in the substance of what he said. And then they started parroting back phrases you hear from the president all the time that, yes, of course, prices have gone up in America, but that's nothing like what the cost would be if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon and that you can't put a price on safety and security and that they were more than happy to be paying more for petrol or gas, as they obviously call it, if that's what the president thought was needed to be done.

4:32And people I spoke to, plenty of them who I spoke to who were against the war in Iran, weren't really Donald Trump supporters in the first place. And so it was really eye opening to me. The number of people I met who were very happy to say that they back the president pretty much whatever he does. Which has been a feature, hasn't it, of Donald Trump's presence in American politics for the last decade, longer than a decade now. I mean, he has. I remember back in 2016, there were sort of scholarly articles where they would ask Trumpians, as Michael from Hampshire calls them, Trumpians, whether they supported X or supported Y.

5:11And then when told the president now supports Y, they would change their support from X to Y and do it quite naturally and say, no, if he if he believes it, then we believe it, too. And it is exactly as you say, Sarah. It's a really big reminder, isn't it, that there is a quite large group of people. We refer to them airily as the base, but a large group of people in various walks of life around the United States who are followers of Donald Trump. And they trust Donald Trump still, even if. Whatever. Yeah, exactly. Thick and thin. But it's kind of the whole vibes thing, right, that Donald Trump was elected on the basis of personality and vibes.

5:45And of course, policies, but actually he's tied less so to those and more so to people are saying, I'm going to vote for you because I trust the decisions that you're going to make as president. There's one other difference as well, of course, with what's happening in Iran and previous wars that Donald Trump's railed against, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is the US casualties are very low up until this point. I mean, this weekend in attacks on US bases, two soldiers were killed, one's missing. So we don't know what might happen there. But that's a tiny fraction of what you saw in Afghanistan, in Iraq, thinking back to Vietnam, when you had so many of the armed forces being killed or really, really seriously injured and coming home.

6:25That if it seems unlikely, it's difficult to imagine the circumstances in which Donald Trump would ever agree to put boots on the ground and therefore potentially sustain far more casualties. But I think that is another key difference that we shouldn't overlook. Going back to Michael's question, that is precisely it, isn't it? That's the big, big difference. So surely it now qualifies as a never-ending war, Michael says, one of these forever wars. Forever Wars, by the way, a book written, I think, in the early 1970s. It was a sci-fi book written by someone who was an objector to the Vietnam War.

6:58So it's been there as an idea in American politics for decades, this idea that you shouldn't get involved in a forever war. So this seems to me to be a forever war if they do go for the boots on the ground because the one thing you can do when you bomb things, Sarah, of course, is stop bombing them and in a sense then sort of declare, well, the war's over. And in a sense, we're still getting that, aren't we, from the White House and from the Secretary of State, actually, Marco Rubio. We should listen to him saying, at the height of this latest uptick in violence and the targeting of coastal sites with radar, drone facilities, even a desalination plant, according to Iranian media.

7:44And that would be an upping of the ante. But amid all of that, on Sunday evening, Marco Rubio saying, two reporters at the airbase, at Andrew's Air Base in Washington, saying this. What I will say is that the United States always remains open to a diplomatic solution. We've tried multiple times with Iran and we'll continue to try. If that door opens, we'll be happy to see it open. And they continue to send signals that they want to talk, that they want to negotiate. But their behavior is what we're responding to. And their behavior is they're launching missiles and drones against ships, including tonight.

8:19That shows you, doesn't it, Justin, I think, where the confusion is within all of this diplomatic process and why it's going to be so incredibly difficult to get it back on track. Marco Rubio there is saying that it's the Iranians who broke the deal, the ceasefire deal essentially, by launching missiles and drones against ships. Well, the Iranians say that they were within their rights within the ceasefire deal to do that because they were the ones who were supposed to be administering the Strait of Hormuz and they're attacking ships that aren't going through the particular channel in the strait that the Iranians want them to use.

8:51So, I mean, this is a consequence of some very loose language in that memorandum of understanding, which was fudged in order to get both sides to agree to it. And then unsurprisingly, very quickly became unstuck because it wasn't absolutely clear what everybody had to stick to. All along, Donald Trump also has been saying, firstly, that the Iranians are sending signals that they want to negotiate and that he is happy to do so as well, that he would still prefer a negotiated outcome. But I don't think we're any closer to seeing how that could possibly work than we were either when they signed that memorandum of understanding or when it started falling to bits.

9:24Another aspect of this story is that we have been seeing some disagreement on the right. So Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and the former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene were arguing on social media at the weekend. So Pete Hegseth had posted saying, Godspeed heroes, their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve, which was about these two US service members who were killed in Jordan. And then Marjorie Taylor Greene responded by saying, sacrifice? What the beep are you talking about? They did not willingly sacrifice themselves. They were killed because of the war you, Trump and the admin, are waging on behalf of a foreign country, Israel.

9:56You mean their deaths fuel your bloodlust for a senseless war? And when I read that, Sarah, I thought that could come from anyone on the progressive left so-called, couldn't it? I mean, it would absolutely not be out of place, those very words from, I don't know, Zoran Mamdani or anyone else representing the progressive left. He might have tempered his. I think she goes further than Mamdani. Yeah, no, it's a good point. It's a good point. Probably goes further and clearer about Israel, disliking Israel and not thinking he should be doing Israel's bidding, etc., etc. It really is that the horseshoe has met.

10:28And the shift in American politics on the left and on the right against Israel is absolutely remarkable. And that's what's going to be the biggest change, I think, that's come out of this war with Iran, but also with what happened in Gaza and with anger on both sides of the political divide about that as well and with Bibi Netanyahu. But we're looking at, I think, a generational change in the way America is going to be dealing with Israel. It tends to be older politicians and commentators who still think that America should stick by Israel come what may and continue to supply it with arms and billions of dollars every year.

11:04And among younger activists at all parts of the political spectrum, you're hearing more and more anger about the way Israel's behaving, why it's unnecessary for America to be propping them up. And of course, you know, in some quarters that spills over into really nasty anti-Semitism. But there are a lot of people who are not remotely anti-Semitic, but who are absolutely arguing that America has been led around by the nose by Israel and that that has to stop. And I think that's going to produce a real long term change here, actually. I think it's worth highlighting as well that a lot of the language Marjorie Taylor Greene is using there and the argument she's making is one that some of the alternative influencers who have previously been very big supporters of Donald Trump but are shifting away from that, take Tucker Carlson, take Candace Owens.

11:46They talk about Israel in this way all the time. And I think it'll be really interesting to see how that does play out over the next couple of years, really, because they have been instrumental in really drumming up support for Donald Trump. And if they ebb away, you see, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene is just the sort of tip of the iceberg, but you wonder how many other people will buy into their arguments much more so than Donald Trump's. All right, moving on. We have had an email from Lance in Devon, and he is asking about the announcement this weekend that Truth Social, that's Donald Trump's own social media platform, is proposing to sell early releases of policy changes to users who pay, he says, a no doubt substantial fee as a form of enhanced subscription.

12:24Surely financial regulators would have to consider this the equivalent to insider trading. And this was an announcement that came from the Trump and Media Technology Group, who own Truth Social, saying that a paid service will give Wall Street firms instant access to market-related posts. So anything that Donald Trump's announcing, new policy or tariffs or whatever that could potentially move markets. And over the last few months, I mean, Donald Trump has been moving markets enormously with things that he says over the war in Iran that affect the price of oil or tariff announcements. I mean, yeah, I mean, way more than any other president normally, I think.

12:59Things he says have the potential to shift billions of dollars around on Wall Street. Yeah, and there's a suggestion that it could be as much as$100 ,000 a month for this subscription, although that's from Reuters, but other reports do suggest this lower fee of about$60 ,000 a month. Oh, that's fine. That's easy, easy, easy, if you sign up for a three-year plan. It's really interesting this because Trump Media and Technology Group have been pretty vague about whether Donald Trump's own posts will be included in this package deal or not. I mean, they are obviously the ones that people are most interested in in terms of their ability to move the market and so on and so forth.

13:35I think the main thing I take away from this is what we've known for quite a while, which is true social is not profitable, really. It's kind of like a, I don't know, like an announcement portal for Donald Trump, really. Like it doesn't have it might have a pretty active user base, but it doesn't have a huge user base. And particularly with Elon Musk taking over X, there was never this mass migration to Truth Social. So this seems to me like a kind of obvious way for them to try and make sure that their platform is profitable and sustainable. Because at the moment, it's just sort of like Donald Trump having his kind of own outlet, really.

14:04I mean, there are there are other accounts that use it, but it's only really when he posts and then it's reported like like statements that that we hear about Truth Social. It's not it's not otherwise hugely active. Is it insider trading? I don't think it is because it's still publicly accessible. and insider trading is trading on information that isn't publicly accessible. So that's sort of by its tight definition, legal definition, I wouldn't have thought it is. Is it well dodgy, to use another phrase? Sarah, is it well dodgy? I think probably covers it. Yeah, and I suppose you're right, Justin, because you can pay a subscription to Reuters News Service or something, can't you?

14:40To Associated Press, and then you would see announcements maybe a bit quicker than before they'd been turned around and put on the BBC website or the New York Times website or something. So I suppose it's analogous with that and therefore probably not illegal. The plans are very vague. When I was reading them last week, it seemed to me that we were maybe talking about a matter of seconds, actually, between when people who paid the subscription would find out what the president was saying and when people like us were, because I was scratching my head trying to work out if as journalists we would need to subscribe to this in order to get the news fast enough.

15:10But I think we're talking about a very, very short amount of time. I'd love to see your expenses for that, Sarah. That could be a little bit tricky. That's going to be higher than your bar bill. We'd just come back with refused well dodgy written on it, wouldn't it? Yeah, I mean, if it's seconds. We think of the Bloomberg terminal, don't you? So the people who want to know, who need to know things very quickly, as in seconds count, subscribe to the Bloomberg terminals, big financial institutions, et cetera. and I suppose you could subscribe as an individual if you really wanted to. But are you really getting yourself very far?

15:52It's only useful, really, if you require that information to make money out of it, essentially. Also, it's worth saying that when Donald Trump is no longer president, that subscription is probably not very useful. So you'd have to have a bit of an expiry date on it. Imagine in five years' time, you're like, why are we paying$100 ,000 for Truth Social? What's going on here? It's like one of those things where you find you signed up for something and you then discover years later. And then you go in your bill, you're like, what is that? What was I doing? Let's go to another email. It comes from Alan in Portsmouth who sent us this question.

16:26What happens to the USA in terms of all things DJ Trump has put his name on or has had change to suit his presidency, i.e. the Gulf of America, Miami, DJ Trump Airport, the Department of War, his signature on the$100 bill, Trump-class warships, etc., etc. Can the new presidential team remove Trump's name, almost like a big cleanup operation to restore things back to some sort of sensible place that we can all feel comfortable with, says Alan, speaking for the people at least that he knows in Portsmouth, Sarah. But is he going to be disappointed or not in, I don't know, five years time, 10 years time?

17:07Well, fascinating, isn't it? Because there's what can you do legally and then there's what are people likely to do politically. So yes, legally, they could probably change absolutely everything. So his signature on the$100 bill, I think, is a special thing just for this 250th year, because that's how it's not meant, living president's not meant to be on the currency. So that's how he got around that. Yeah, I mean, he changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and you could change it back just as easily. You might remember President Obama changed the name of Mount McKinley in Alaska to Mount Denali, which was to recognize Native American names and not impose the name of a white presidential candidate on it.

17:47Well, as soon as he was back in office, Donald Trump just changed it back again to Mount McKinley. So people can do that kind of thing. I mean, in terms of the airports, every other airport's named after somebody, and many of them presidents. I fly in and out of Ronald Reagan Airport all the time, and quite often from Ronald Reagan Airport into John F. Kennedy Airport. So why shouldn't Donald Trump have an airport named after him or a class of warships. That does happen with other presidents. The question is, when he leaves office, will there be a point at which his name is so toxic it is politically acceptable, it may be even a political imperative for somebody to sort of clean it off everything?

18:25Or will he go down as one of the biggest, most transformative presidents in American history and that he's got every right, like Ronald Reagan or one of these other big Republican presidents, to have his name memorialised all over the place? Is there a Richard Nixon airport? I can't think of one. I don't think there is. There's obviously a Richard Nixon presidential library, but there isn't an airport, is there? Oh, maybe one will come because there's a bit of a resurgence in Nixon popularity, isn't there, on some parts of the right? There used to be a Bob Hope airport in Los Angeles and then they got rid of it because nobody knew where it was.

18:58So you can lose the names, can't you? But I suppose, yeah, it will depend on his legacy, won't it? And whether anyone can be bothered, I suppose, to re-litigate stuff or whether they just... Because with Reagan Airport, some people who don't like Ronald Reagan still call it national, don't they? And they can just... and you can get away with that. It's a lot easier, of course, to take his name off things than it will be to try and shrink the size of the enormous ballroom or get rid of the arc de Trump if he manages to put that up in Washington or some of the other physical changes that he's making to the White House and the whole of Washington.

19:34That's a good point, actually, isn't it? because blowing things up. That's not a good look. That's not a good look, is it? Also when a lot of money's been spent on making it in the first place. Yeah, flattening the ballroom. You're going to be a brave president who does that. It depends slightly, I think. Well, obviously, really, it depends how he leaves office. I mean, one thing Donald Trump hasn't managed to get his name on yet is the World Cup trophy. But he was very much there at the World Cup final and got himself involved in handing over the trophy as well, inserting himself into the ceremony.

20:03And it looked like having to be kind of chased off the stage so that Spain could take their victory photos lifting the cup without having Donald Trump right there in the middle of it. And afterwards, he spoke to reporters about what he made of the final. I thought it was incredible. It was four times greater than any FIFA ever held. And it's probably about five times, actually, they're telling me today. So we're very proud of our country. We're very proud of the job that was done by everybody. We congratulate Johnny Infantino and all of his staff and the incredible job they did. But this was one of the greatest events of any kind ever held.

20:41So we're really happy that it did so well. And all over the world, people have come and they've loved our country. You know, it's shown off our country in a different light. It was a great thing. It was a great event and I'm glad you all enjoyed it. I have to say, I am absolutely gutted that the World Cup is over just because I absolutely love watching it and I've nearly completed my World Cup sticker book. What I found really interesting, though, watching the final, was, yeah, you knew that Donald Trump would do this thing where he tries to get in the photo, right? Because he did the same when Chelsea won the Club World Cup and there were all of these quite funny pictures of footballers like Cole Palmer and Rhys James looking at him like, why are you here?

21:19And again, yesterday, he sort of stood in the middle with Rodri, who's the captain of Spain, and then you saw Rodri kind of look at him like, can you move along please? And then you've got Infantino kind of leading him away like you can't actually stand in the middle of the photo. And there was loads of analysis on social media about the way that the different players interacted with Donald Trump. So there were two Argentinian players that appeared to not shake his hand when they went up on stage. You saw sort of Rodri, for example, the captain kind of waiting for him to move out the way. And there's something quite interesting about the political, I know we did our whole mini series on this about the World Cup, but the kind of political undercurrents of this World Cup and how people were sort of analysing in a way I've not really seen before, like people shaking hands.

22:02I actually just think quite a lot of footballers probably are inherently quite uncomfortable with football becoming political in a way that they're not used to, right? Like they're really good at playing football. It's not always their job to have a strong political opinion. But there are, for example, footballers like Kylian Mbappe who regularly posts about politics and is actually really sort of supportive for that on social media. So it's been interesting watching how in some ways the kind of Trumpian involvement has meant that some players have decided to make political points, it seems, in ways they wouldn't usually.

22:28Was it a success, Sarah? Well, to the extent that America fell in love with soccer or football and really, really got involved in watching and enjoying the games, even after the United States went out, they were very, very welcoming of the England and the Scotland team. Scotland made a huge impression on Boston. For the short amount of time they were still in the tournament. And, yeah, I mean, and nothing went wrong, really, did it, apart from Donald Trump's involvement over a red card. It was probably, yeah, by that measure, a success. How you decide whether it was four times greater or five times greater than any other World Cup ever held, I don't know.

23:02Now, he might be talking about revenue or tickets sold or something like that, something by which it's measurable. But that would be because it was a much bigger competition than ever before with more teams playing more rounds, wasn't it, Mariana? Yeah, it was a massive tournament in terms of the number of teams. And you saw teams like Cape Verde, who had a brilliant tournament, like made it way further than anyone thought. Their goalkeeper had some incredible performances. And there was this real, like we chatted about it on another episode, but this real feel good factor around people coming to America and their people, Americans embracing their cultures and people embracing American culture.

23:35You saw like the Norwegians doing their rowboat stuff. And you saw, I mean, all sorts of facts. The Algerians in Louisville, Kansas. You saw so many really kind of positive displays of America and of foreign cultures meeting America. But one thing I would say, just on your point, Sarah, you made about the red card saga when Donald Trump basically said he'd called up Infantino and asked for them to overturn this red card, was that I think that Donald Trump and America actually come quite well out of the World Cup, but I don't think FIFA come very well out of it. And the narratives around sort of corruption from FIFA are the most, like, cemented I've ever seen them on social media.