Last July, when the International Olympic Committee announced that Los Angeles would host the 2028 Olympic games, the Trump administration immediately seized on the political opportunities posed by the good fortune. Not only did the occasion mark the first time in some two decades that the games would be held on American soil, but Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had also publicly tried and failed to help Chicago host the 2016 Games. Moreover, Trump found in the I.O.C. exactly the sort of deference that he most cherishes. “Since his election, President Trump has been personally involved in helping to make L.A.’s bid a truly American bid,” the committee noted in a statement, “and the White House Office of American Innovation and the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have been true partners throughout.”
The Office of American Innovation, of course, is Jared Kushner’s treehouse within the West Wing—a small, enigmatic, nebulous coterie tasked with everything from solving Middle East peace to government I.T. The Office of American Innovation is generally derided as sort of a punch line within Washington, but Trump’s decision to hand the White House's work for the Olympic bid to Kushner suggests his diminished faith in the rest of his organization. As one person familiar with the situation described to me, “Who else in the administration outside of that office could take a project from start to finish?”
Around the time of the Olympic success, a handful of interested parties, including Trump booster Robert Kraft, who owns the N.F.L.’s New England Patriots and Major League Soccer’s New England Revolution, reached out to the president, urging him to get involved with an effort to bring the 2026 World Cup to North America. Trump agreed, and, again handed the lift over to Kushner and O.A.I. Kushner headed a group of about five people—some from O.A.I., others from the White House Counsel’s office and the Staff Secretary’s office—to help lead the effort. Almost immediately, Kushner hopped on his first conference call to discuss what the administration could do to help.
By that July, the United States Soccer Federation, along with the corresponding groups from Canada and Mexico, had already confirmed its intentions to bid for the games in North America, and had since become the overwhelming favorite on account of its advanced infrastructure, facilities, and transportation options. North America’s chances were also buoyed by FIFA’s effort to rotate the tournament around the world, blocking any of its six continental confederations from bidding if they had hosted a World Cup within the previous eight years. Since Russia and Qatar had locked up the games in 2018 and 2022, Asia and Europe were eliminated from consideration. By August, on the final day countries were allowed to announce their intentions, Morocco announced its intention to bid for the games.
Morocco had previously sought the World Cup in 1994, 1998, 2006, and 2010, but had been passed over each time on account of skepticism about its infrastructure capacity and capital. In any year, it would seem like an overmatched competitor against North America. But this year was different. The travel ban put in place by the Trump administration was not only politically appalling to members of the international community, but it might also restrict players from a couple of the countries likely to compete for spots in a tournament—a major consideration since the 2026 World Cup would increase to 48 teams. Several of Trump’s public comments about North America’s bid were also perceived as threats or undue pressure. In April, for example, he tweeted that it “It would be a shame if countries that we always support were to lobby against the U.S. bid. Why should we be supporting these countries when they don’t support us?”
A few days later, as he hosted Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, he told reporters at a press conference that “We will be watching very closely, and any help they can give us in that bid, we would appreciate.” As such, countries like France, Belgium, and Russia threw their weight behind Morocco, and the 56 votes that come from Africa were expected to sway that way, too.
Undeterred, the bid committee went into a full-court press, traveling around the globe to meet with about 150 of the 211 FIFA federation. The committee started communicating to Kushner, according to the person familiar with the situation, about how he might be able to exert his increasing influence on the global stage. Last July, around the time when the White House was starting to dig into helping with the FIFA bid, Kushner took a surreptitious trip to Saudi Arabia where he spent considerable time with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, invariably known as M.B.S. (The two reportedly stayed up until 4 A.M. in the morning in private conversations.) This person said that Kushner asked M.B.S. directly for Saudi Arabia’s vote. He did the same with the House of Khalifa in Bahrain. “He was asking for a very large thing—to vote for the U.S. instead of a more natural partner, in Morocco,” this person said. “And yet, they were very willing.”
Last month, Saudi Arabia announced it would back the U.S. “They knocked on our door from 2017, before everyone, and we don’t close the door to allies,” Turki Al Alshikh, head of the Saudi Sports Authority, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in June. “Our brothers in Morocco didn’t ask for help for us on this issue until a month ago, and we’d given our word to the Americans.”
Kushner leaned on the relationships he’d developed in his NAFTA talks with both Mexico and Canada to make sure the other two countries were on track in putting their bid packages together. The person familiar with the situation said that Kushner also shepherded through the presidential decision memo—a crucial part of the package—that requires certain Cabinet secretaries to make guarantees to FIFA about what their agencies are willing to provide in way of support. The Department of Homeland Security, for instance, had to assure the committee that players would, in fact, be able to easily enter the country for the tournament. The Departments of State, Transportation, and Commerce had to make similar guarantees. President Trump also made entreaties to the committee, giving them his word that his immigration policy would not hinder travel to the U.S. for the World Cup. As The New York Times reported, the White House engaged in an interagency review that helped Trump craft a series of three letters sent to FIFA president Gianni Infantino earlier this year, assuring officials that his hard-line immigration policies would not restrict people coming into the country for the matches.
On June 13, in a vote conducted in—where else?—Moscow, North America won the bid, 134 to 65. Kushner and his team in the White House found out like everyone else did—after FIFA tweeted out the vote—before the committee made a call to the White House. In what has been a long year and a half for the O.A.I., it was a nice validation. “The narrative is O.A.I. is not competent and inexperienced. But this is an accomplishment. It’s done. It is. It’s not what can be, what might be. There’s going to be a whole tournament here,” the person familiar with the situation said. Kushner and the small team that worked on it together made a little pact to go together to a match in 2026, acknowledging that who knows where they will all be by then.
