Two hundred fifty years and two days into the American experiment, a 55-year-old bespectacled bald man from Liverpool enters a sterile hotel conference room in Atlanta, shaking his head. “It’s all gone to hell, hasn’t it?” he mutters. 

In 14 hours, the United States men’s soccer team is scheduled to play Belgium in the World Cup Round of 16, a match that ought to be a celebration of the U.S.’s triumphant, and somewhat unexpected, run in the world’s biggest sporting event. But Folarin Balogun, Team USA’s star striker, was given a red card during the previous match with Bosnia-Herzegovina—he stepped on another player’s ankle—that made him ineligible to play. This led President Trump to petition FIFA to review the penalty, which, of course, triggered allegations of collusion and corruption: International lawyers were summoned to draft appeals, and a joyous sporting event started to look more like a legal drama. 

For Roger Bennett, the scandal threatened to overshadow every value he has been working 16 years to promote. “This is not why we watch,” he told me just after 6 a.m., settling into a chair for what would be almost two straight hours of TV appearances. “It’s antithetical to the beauty we are trying to protect.” 

If this kind of language about sports turns you off, you will likely not enjoy Bennett or the many hundreds of pieces of World Cup content that his company, the Men in Blazers Media Network, has put out over the past month. In the broadest terms, Bennett is a soccer podcaster and new-media executive. A better description of him might be: America’s chief soccer evangelist. Before we knew that the U.S. would get crushed by Belgium 4–1, before the team’s chances for World Cup glory died on the field, Bennett declared that Monday, July 6, would be the most important day in the country’s history. In theory, he was joking—but honestly, I wasn’t sure.

Ever since Bennett started his podcast, on a whim in 2010, he has been monomaniacally devoted to getting Americans not just to enjoy soccer but to become emotionally invested in it. For Bennett, the sport is a way to access the big, complex feelings and topics that typical sports fans don’t always talk about: community, love, agony, joy, Emily Dickinson’s poetry. A box of tissues emblazoned with the phrase Cry Proudly is prominently displayed in his podcast studio.

I first met Bennett in 2014, when his stint covering the World Cup for ESPN made him a niche celebrity among the set of weirdos in America (me) obsessing over soccer and waking up before dawn to cheer on clubs from English towns they’d never been to. Bennett was certain that the United States would soon embrace soccer—an intoxicating but tenuous idea that now reads as prescient. Millions of Americans have watched the men’s team make a run in the World Cup this year—the first time the country has hosted the men’s tournament since 1994. In fact, Monday’s game against Belgium reportedly pulled in more viewers than the 2025 World Series and Game 5 of the NBA Finals. 

[Listen: How the World Cup explains the world]

This is a moment of vindication for Men in Blazers, but it also has a greater meaning for Bennett, who became an American citizen in 2018. He routinely ends his podcast monologues with the phrase “I love America” and openly expresses his patriotism. “I grew up in the dying embers of the English class system,” he told me. “I felt very trapped. America always felt like the opposite, like opportunity. For me, that was life-affirming, life-saving.”

Maybe that all sounds cheesy. But it’s been hard to miss the collective enthusiasm and sense of American community emanating from the tournament: the initial delights of watching Scotland’s Tartan Army drink and bagpipe its way through New England, winning over steely Bostonians along the way; or the residents of Lawrence, Kansas, embracing the Algerian team with marching-band pep rallies. There was the viral pleasure and even pride in seeing foreigners encounter Buc-ee’s with reverential appreciation or giddily experience industrial quantities of Mountain Dew Baja Blast at Taco Bell. 

Then there were the games themselves, seemingly broadcast on every available public television in America. Over the past month, I’ve seen strangers in the airport rapturously celebrating over last-second goals, gaggles of men and women kicking soccer balls on city streets while clad in a veritable United Nations of jerseys. People in my life who are normally allergic to sports have come over for marathon World Cup viewing sessions. At one point I found myself—a man from Cleveland—wearing a Senegal jersey, sweatily embracing a Senegalese man after a spectacular volley sent the ball to the back of the net. It felt like a dream. 

Dreams always end, and in a way, that’s what happened on Monday. But Bennett’s larger ideology, that soccer is the “most important, least important thing,” may yet endure. There’s a reason he hired more than 100 people and retrofitted a coach bus into a mobile podcasting studio—a reason he spent the past month traveling across the country for a series of rowdy pre-match shows with fans. Moments like these forge bonds that don’t easily break.

Before the sun is up, I watch as Bennett goes on Morning Joe and CBS Mornings, and rips through a slew of radio and podcast hits. He calls nearly everyone he works with on these shows “a beautiful human being” and ends every interview with the same sign-off: “Big, big love to you.”

Bennett pops up from his table the instant his last interview ends. Within 30 seconds he’s on his phone, rifling off voice memos to people on his staff and agents of players he’s trying to book. “When’s Jon Stewart coming on?” he asks his producer, who pulls up a booking sheet a mile long. He completes seven phone calls in as many minutes just after 9 a.m., and tells each person on the other end that he loves them before hanging up. By 9:30, we’re in a production meeting for that day’s Men in Blazers live show; Bennett is Zooming in from his phone, because he’s outside picking up coffees for his team. A staffer on the call informs him that they’ve made a giant cardboard cutout of a lemon-pepper-wet chicken wing—an Atlanta delicacy—for somebody in the crowd to wave. “You could not be a more beautiful soul. You make the world a better place,” Bennett replies.

The day moves on. A detailed planning meeting is convened to discuss next summer’s Women’s World Cup. Men in Blazers is already pitching sponsors based on its online engagement numbers—according to Blinkfire, a marketing-analytics firm, the company has almost twice the engagement per follower across social media this tournament than the World Cup’s official broadcast partner, Fox Sports. Bennett out-hustles more established outlets by relentlessly blanketing the internet with instant-reaction clips, multiple daily podcasts, and memes; he then uses that attention to drive people to Men in Blazers’ frequent live shows, building an army of loyal obsessives. Listening to Bennett articulate this strategy and then jump into another TV interview, I’m struck by the realization that this whole operation resembles a political campaign as much as a media company. It’s hope and change and a bright new vision for America complete with stoppage time and hydration breaks.

[Listen: How short-form clips took over the internet]

Somewhere around coffee No. 5, Bennett and a few people from his team head to Busy Bee, a legendary soul-food café in Atlanta, to document some of the World Cup host city’s culture—another page from the campaign playbook, though Bennett’s excitement for the chicken and waffles is palpable. Outside next to the parking lot, sitting on a swelteringly hot picnic table, Bennett attempts to explain why he’s been averaging just three and a half hours of sleep a day for the past 26 days. He argues that what many people have been feeling over the past month, with each watch party or viral video of fans going crazy, is what the sociologist Émile Durkheim calls collective effervescence—a feeling of unity that emerges from a shared experience. 

Bennett’s theory is that the World Cup, a rare monocultural event in today’s fragmented world, is one of the few reliable producers of such effervescent spectacles; it’s good for the internet, but also good for the soul. His media-distribution system ties it all together: “When Congo scores that goal, they need the immediate reaction, then they need the Congo fans across America; they need the scene in Kinshasa, the postgame on the field and the tears, the locker room, the Congo fans in Queens or Brooklyn,” he said. “It’s just incredible and it’s happening every single game.”

I can see why one would get swept up in what Bennett describes as “a very profound moment for the nation, which is so busy falling back in love with the world, and the world falling back in love with America.” The entire event feels at times like a summer vacation, a much-needed reprieve from harrowing world events. A cynic could see it as artificial or inauthentic—geopolitics, only without all the horrific stuff. And yet the moments are authentic, which may be why the White House intervention and FIFA’s arbitrary and unusual red-card suspension felt so jarring, even offensive, to die-hard fans of the tournament. It was a reminder that politics always lurk in the background, and that the euphoria is fragile. A U.S. loss would be a stress test.

About an hour into the game, with the U.S. down 2–1 to Belgium and looking positively shell-shocked, Bennett distracts himself by asking another Men in Blazers host, Becky Sauerbrunn, a former U.S. women’s team captain and two-time World Cup champion, what it feels like when you get scored on by your opponent immediately after you score. (Not good is the answer.) Later, when a flub by the U.S. goalkeeper puts Belgium up 3–1, Bennett yells at the television: “Not like this!” The agony is genuine. A close, competitive U.S. loss would hurt, but maybe it would be fine. This result, though—an impotent, scared team that is clearly not ready for the moment—feels like two steps forward and one very large step back. “This is not good for business,” Bennett said to me, cracking a weak smile.

What I’ll remember most about the game is how quickly confidence turned into insecurity. Shortly after the final whistle, announcers on Fox offered a sheepish plea to their massive broadcast audience: This doesn’t have to be the last game you watch. Sitting in a room with Bennett and Sauerbrunn and others like them, people who have devoted their lives to the sport, you could sense just how precarious the moment felt to them. How can you promise hope and change if the results stay the same?

Bennett was adamant that the Men in Blazers’ YouTube livestream start the minute the game ended, as if to avoid giving the audience too much time to think about what they’d seen. For almost two hours, Bennett and his co-hosts, plus special guests including the The Fault in Our Stars author John Green, dissected the match, which Bennett dubbed “a cup of tears and darkness, self-loathing, fear, and human agony.” As far as podcasting goes, the show should have been a grueling, dismal spectacle. But Bennett, who had been up early enough to text me at 4:35 a.m., was slaphappy, making jokes about Thomas the Tank Engine and quoting lines about pain from Dante’s Inferno. All the while, listeners poured into the stream, which became a strange, beautiful form of catharsis. “Football,” Green said one hour into the show, “is not about destinations; that’s the thing that we mistake all the time. It’s about journeys. Because if it was about destinations, no one would like it.”

After the show, Bennett rallied half a dozen people—many of whom had been up for almost a full 24 hours—for a midnight Waffle House excursion. “I’ll always remember this night and being with all of you,” he told the group. The pep talk reminded me of an anecdote Bennett had told me earlier. His mother-in-law had become obsessed with taking family photos at every get-together, no matter how inconvenient or annoying. “What she’s realized is that photographs and memories are inextricably connected,” he said. “I’m very aware of how memory is formed. And in this moment, this tournament, memory is being formed.” Suddenly, it clicked: Bennett is obsessively documenting the insanity, the joy, the collective effervescence so that we remember how this all felt. So we don’t lose it.

I had plans to meet Bennett early the next morning, but I slept through my alarm. When I texted to apologize, he confessed that he had almost missed a morning TV hit, having fallen asleep, laptop on his chest. Political campaigns are exhausting. But Bennett wasn’t defeated. Too much progress had been made. “As I speak to you, I am headed to Atlanta Stadium to watch Lionel Messi face Mo Salah,” he texted back. “The streets are packed. Football is here and thousands of people are ready to make memories again.”

It was all a “misunderstanding.” That’s the word that NPR Editor in Chief Thomas Evans used to describe why, today, the outlet erroneously published a report by the veteran Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg that Justice Samuel Alito had retired. According to an archived copy, available on the Wayback Machine, the 1,186-word story was published at 10:51 a.m. eastern time. In the story, Totenberg attributed her reporting to the Court itself, not to an anonymous source. Minutes later, the Supreme Court’s public-information office said that the Court had not made any such announcement.

NPR, to its credit, quickly retracted the story, issued a correction, and apologized. Because NPR syndicates its reporting to hundreds of public-radio affiliates across the country, the incorrect news of Alito’s retirement was picked up by numerous stations before needing to be retracted by them as well. At least one publication—Vox—followed NPR’s reporting and also had to retract a story. The result: roughly an hour of speculation and unnecessary chaos on what was already an intense day of rulings for the Court, including a decision allowing states to bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports and a rejection of President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship.

So what really happened here? NPR’s public editor, Kelly McBride, wrote this afternoon that Totenberg had listened to Chief Justice John Roberts announcing retirements at the Court and misheard the statement. She then contacted her intern at the Court and the NPR executive editor who published the story. (NPR and the Supreme Court press office did not respond to a request for comment.) The New York Times reported that the story lacked extra steps of verification because it cited an announcement instead of an anonymous source.

According to McBride, much of the story had been prewritten in anticipation of Alito announcing retirement. This is a common practice for reporters who cover a specific beat; in some cases, as with high-profile elections, reporters write two versions of the same story, anticipating either outcome. Prewriting is also a common practice for obituaries. The archived story includes at least one flagrant typo, suggesting that perhaps the story was published before it was ready.

This is a scenario that reporters lose sleep thinking about. There are a number of potential lessons here: that a breakneck news cycle is forcing even the best reporters and editors to move too fast, that modern beat reporting itself has become too consumed with being first to report stories where the “exclusive” title adds little value. (Totenberg’s story, which was packed with expert context and analysis, would have been valuable even if it had been published five minutes after a competitor.) You could also make an argument that such errors have never been costlier in an era when trust in media has never been lower, or that the very dynamics that push legacy news outlets to rush and lose credibility are the very ones that reward shock jocks and those peddling misleading information.

But, in attempting to document the fallout from the NPR story, I’m struck by how little there was. Outside of a confusing few minutes, very few people other than media critics and Court observers have seemed to care about the mistake. The right-wing media feeds that I monitor—full of people whose livelihoods depend on disparaging the mainstream media as “fake news”—barely registered the error, aside from a half-hearted post here and there. A few explanations seem to exist for this: First, NPR’s quick retraction makes it harder to spin a convoluted conspiracy theory. Second, MAGA media is far more focused on the Court itself and the rejection of Trump’s birthright-citizenship executive order. Third, it’s just possible that on an internet dominated by gambling sites, news influencers, propagandists, slop, and gossip, it is not nearly as scandalous as it once was to be colossally wrong for a few minutes.

NPR’s mistake is, by journalistic standards, a massive blunder. A valid question, though, is how many people still care about those standards. The lack of hand-wringing from outside legacy media may indicate a bigger shift. NPR sits squarely in what is known as the “mainstream” media. But the moniker is outdated for our current age. From newsroom missteps to swift, public corrections and contrition, the codified standards and practices of outlets such as NPR—namely, obsessions with accuracy, fairness, and public correction—are no longer quite so mainstream in a world dominated by nimble new media.

On my feed this afternoon, I saw one person post that perhaps Totenberg “was just trying to time the story release to hit just after placing her Kalshi bet on when Alito would retire.” The post appears to be in jest, and, to be clear, there is absolutely zero evidence to suggest this. But the joke is not really about Totenberg. It is about the cynical nature of our current moment and the broader feeling of living in a low-trust society—one in which a U.S. soldier can be charged with betting on prediction markets using classified information and where news organizations such as CNN, Dow Jones, and CNBC are partnering with those same companies for polling insights. In a world where everyone is now constantly suspicious of insider trading, manipulation, and ulterior motives, it makes sense that NPR’s mistaken report would barely register as a news story. For NPR, perhaps the only thing more unnerving than a giant misstep like this one is few people paying attention to it—and to the organization—at all.

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If you wanted to make an argument that we are all living in some cruel simulation, a key piece of evidence might be that the news keeps providing us with absurd, occasionally quite alarming metaphors for what it’s like to exist in 2026. To wit: The London School of Economics recently canceled an event on extreme heat because of an extreme-heat warning issued by the United Kingdom’s Met Office.

Or, closer to home for Americans: Donald Trump, trying to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for America’s 250th birthday and, instead, scoring a tax-payer-funded, $14 million-over-budget own goal in the form of a cracked and peeling, green-algae-riddled, potentially duck-killing militarized zone in the nation’s capital. One of the firms hired for the renovation is named Greenwater Services.

This is the kind of stuff that AI might spit out if you offered a chatbot a lazy prompt for political satire. The shambolic spectacle has captivated the nation, despite the fact that the Obama administration spent $34 million and 18 months renovating the pool with mixed results. The fallout has reached New York Times push-alert status and become grist for the meme and culture-war mills online. Moreover, Poolgate seems to be bothering Trump more than past fiascoes, which is notable given that he’s particularly embattled at the moment and staring down a defeat in Iran, low poll numbers, and a poor outlook for the midterms. He can’t stop posting about the ordeal on Truth Social, accusing unnamed saboteurs of vandalism. At the White House’s Great American State Fair on Wednesday night, part of the Freedom 250 celebrations, he ranted about the pool.

Trump’s Reflecting Pool debacle is, by definition, a national embarrassment. But America is no stranger to self-inflicted humiliation these days. (See: Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Qatar’s gift of a luxury jet to Trump.) Why, then, is Trump crashing out so hard about the Reflecting Pool? Why does it stand out as the enduring metaphor for an incompetent administration that can’t stop providing enduring metaphors of its own incompetence?

Some reasons are obvious. As my colleague Jonathan Chait notes, uncontrolled algae blooms at the Lincoln Memorial are lower stakes and, frankly, much funnier than, say, a war, a self-dealing cryptocurrency scheme, or the destruction of a wing of the White House. (One photo in particular gets me: Four men in camo waders are in the pool. Water, the color of fresh Mountain Dew, laps at their thighs as they dredge the bottom with poles like cranberry farmers on a faraway radioactive planet.) Lately, the saga has taken a more serious turn: The National Park Service alleges that the liner of the pool was cut with a sharp knife or razor earlier this month, causing damage to the pool’s foam sealant. Trump has claimed that at least six people have been arrested and seven people have been cited for damaging the pool, and a spokesperson from the Interior Department reiterated to me today that “there have been seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed.” According to a report yesterday by MS Now, public records show that only David Hearn, a former Olympic canoer, was arrested. (Hearn has said he was touching a floating piece of paint that had peeled off the pool.)

The spectacle has also been straightforwardly ridiculous, such as when Park Service workers were photographed dumping gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide into the pool one at a time to quell the algae. But Poolgate is something more—a textbook example of how the Trump administration operates. It’s a way that one can explore the anatomy of Trump debacles, which tend to unfold in a (roughly) 13-step process. The Reflecting Pool drama is not all the way through this process yet, but I’d bet good money we’ll get there. It goes as follows:

1. Devise unnecessary spectacle.

The Reflecting Pool—one of the National Mall’s best-known landmarks—is a big, obvious American symbol, and Donald Trump loves big, obvious symbols. Politics and policy are hard. Wars are even harder. But symbols are a layup. Drain that pool, slap some paint on it—be sure to give it a symbolic name: American-flag blue—and boom, you’ve made America great yet again. Extra points if President Obama made a similar move before you and you can claim you’ll do it cheaper, faster, and better. On paper, it looks perfect.

2. Disregard expertise.

According to CNN, in March, the administration reached out to Sika Corporation, the group that provided the concrete and sealing products for the 2010 renovation. The administration stipulated an intense timeline to make the 250th anniversary and that the pool had to be painted blue. Sika said the project was “unfeasible.”

3. Bypass normal procedures.

As The New York Times reported, Trump “handpicked” Atlantic Industrial Coatings for the renovation, giving the company what eventually became a $14.7 million no-bid contract by invoking an exemption “meant for urgent situations.” Trump later alleged he did not know the firm. An Interior Department spokesperson told me, “The contracts and pricing reflects the effort necessary to expedite the timeline of completing the leak prevention coating project—more people, more materials, more equipment and longer hours ahead of our 250th.”

4. Declare victory too early (bonus if done by AI-slop post).

On May 1, Trump posted an image on Truth Social of himself and other Cabinet members shirtless and swimming in the Reflecting Pool.

5. Spend way more than estimated.

“I have a guy who is unbelievable doing swimming pools up the road,” Trump said at the outset of the project. His initial estimate for the price tag was $1.5 million, which he revised the next day to $2 million. He estimated the renovation would last “30, 40, 50 years.” So far the project has cost an estimated $16.4 million.

6. Ignore the haters.

On June 3, as the project was coming in over budget, Trump invited press to the Oval Office to display a piece of poster board that extolled the pool’s size. The caption read, Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.

7. Realize it is not going well.

Algae bloom. Send in the hydrogen-peroxide brigade.

8. Bypass normal procedures once again.

As The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold reported, “The National Park Service bypassed the competitive-bidding process that is typically required” and instead gave a no-bid contract to Greenwater Services to install a filtration system to help with the algae. During construction Trump instructed the presidential motorcade to drive through the drained pool, shortly after the coating was applied, which has raised questions about whether the drive might have damaged the pool.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, told me over email that the Greenwater contract, “was awarded by the Department of Interior” and that “the White House did not play any role in the selection process.” She called the notion that the motorcade affected the pool “dumb and unfounded.” (In all my dealings with the current administration, never before have its spokespeople been as responsive to or seemingly concerned about my impending article.)

9. Allege conspiracy and sabotage.

On Monday, Trump met with reporters and alleged that vandals put fertilizer in the water of the pool as well as cut the seal: “I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up.”

10. Redeclare victory.

Trump said on Wednesday that the pool “looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.” Rogers told me that the pool is now “crystal clear and reflecting perfectly.” The pool is currently cordoned off by fences and protected by the National Guard.

These recurrent steps extend beyond Trump into the broader MAGA coalition. Recently, Jared Holt, a senior researcher at Open Measures, an organization that tracks online extremism, used a generative-AI research tool to spot patterns in posts about the Reflecting Pool by right-wing accounts on a selection of right-wing social-media platforms such as Truth Social. The tool broke down more than 2,500 posts into three buckets:

Phase 1: Triumph and Restoration

Phase 2: Defending the Project

Phase 3: Sabotage and Culture War

“For the MAGA faithful, Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool was supposed to be a shining example of his efforts to restore America from its decaying state,” Holt told me. “When it became clear the renovation had been a disaster, MAGA influencers shifted their talking points to instead portray the situation as being emblematic of their critics’ depravity and derangement.” The pattern, Holt noted, is similar to how the MAGA media system responded to the ICE killings in Minnesota earlier this year, or how it has tried to spin the war in Iran. “The primary function of this media ecosystem is to hype up and pacify Trump’s base. And these days, as public support for the administration craters, it’s doing a lot more of the latter.”

This leaves three steps to come in the future. If patterns hold, we should expect 11. More blaming (one contractor told Politico the repairs to the lining will take weeks), followed by 12. Losing interest. And then, of course, the most important one of all. The foundation upon which every Trump debacle is built. The perpetual-motion device of a petulant president:

13. Pretend it never happened, and move on to the next thing.