Trump’s call to overturn FIFA decision

To the editor,

Two undeniable truths emerge regarding the president’s intervention to reverse the American soccer player Folarin Balogun’s suspension from one game during the FIFA World Cup competition after he was given a red card, and the American men’s soccer team’s subsequent loss to Belgium on July 6 despite Balogun’s participation. First, although Trump said that he knows soccer “really well” and thus could see that Balogun did not deserve to be penalized, he said that he did not know what a red card meant — a basic fact about soccer. In 2018 in the White House, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, showed him a red card and explained what it meant, and Trump tossed the card to the reporters present. So he ought to be ashamed that he forgot, but needless to say, Trump knows no shame about anything.

Second, in 2001 Balogun’s mother had traveled to the U.S. from her native Nigeria while pregnant, and the airline for which she held a ticket deemed her condition to be too precarious for her to fly back to her country. So Balogun was born on American soil — in Brooklyn — and, thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, gained birthright citizenship. He grew up in London and it was only in 2018 that he set foot on U.S. soil again.

I eagerly await the reactions of the Supreme Court justices — and the president’s execrable adviser Stephen Miller — who assert that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to people who were slaves when the amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution, in 1868.

MIRIAM LEVINE HELBOK