Independence Day Quotables
Clinton on 'socialism for the rich'...The end of FIFA? -- Everything Trump touches turns to shit.
Bill Clinton
Clinton had spent his presidency pulling the Democratic Party toward the center, signing welfare reform, deregulating Wall Street, announcing that the era of big government was over. Thirty years later, he was reaching for a line from the left he had spent a career holding at a distance.
“Their New Deal is socialism for the super‑rich (and their own enrichment) even if it means increasing poverty, inequality, and illness at home and around the world.” — Statement
Columnist Dan Merica
Faced with the prospect of a difficult midterm election, and at a time when a number of democratic socialists are winning Democratic primaries and general elections, Republicans are invoking communism as a way to attack the Democratic Party. — Washington Post
Marie Newman
Trump is not making this argument from a position of strength. He is making it from the position of a man who watches his party’s internal polling the way a hypochondriac reads WebMD — with mounting panic and increasingly catastrophic interpretations. — Red Scare 2.0
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The End of FIFA?
Trump personally called FIFA president Gianni Infantino and asked him to review Folarin Balogun’s supposedly “non‑appealable” red card. Within hours, FIFA reversed the suspension — an unprecedented move that stunned global football bodies and triggered formal appeals from Belgium and public condemnation from the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).
“When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake, and the credibility of a competition is undermined.” — UEFA statement
Trump publicly celebrated the reversal on Truth Social, calling it the correction of a “great injustice.”
Is this the end of FIFA?
Short answer: FIFA’s credibility isn’t dead, but it’s bleeding out in public, and the Balogun reversal along with the selective mistreatment of foreign teams is exactly the kind of wound that institutions don’t recover from cleanly.
Long answer: the Trump‑Infantino intervention landed on top of a tournament already marred by inconsistent discipline, opaque officiating, and reports from multiple federations — Iran, Morocco, Colombia, and others — that they were treated differently than “core market” teams.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Sports & Rights Alliance publicly urged FIFA to impose strict human‑rights guarantees on the U.S. because of police violence, immigration enforcement, and treatment of foreign fans and journalists during the 2026 World Cup cycle
Sooner or later, countries and their sports teams will draw the inescapable conclusion that it’s not just FIFA but the U.S. under Trump that is an unfit host and should be barred from hosting international sporting events.
AIAIAI…
Historian, Max Hastings
Should we fail to keep AI and nuclear weapons separate, the odds against Western civilization lasting become a lot shorter. — Bloomberg