WARMINGTON: Donald Trump steps up for Team USA, while Canadian leadership called into question

· Toronto Sun

When your country’s back is against the wall, you see who the real leaders are.

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And are not.

You find out who will step into the arena and risk it all, or who will play it safe out of self-interest.

Taking on the de facto captaincy of the U.S. football team, Captain America, President Donald J. Trump , showed the kind of leadership a country needs when the chips are down. As captain of Canada’s World Cup soccer team, Alphonso Davies showed none of that grit or character and didn’t step onto the field of play to help his country try to advance at the FIFA World Cup.

All the whining about a sore leg doesn’t float in a country noted for fighting hurt as past warriors did on Juno Beach and at Vimy Ridge, or against the Soviet hockey squad, or to win the Stanley Cup as Bobby Baun did for the Maple Leafs on one leg.

Davies didn’t take his hero moment. Trump did.

Some people seize the day and others hide from it. You can decide for yourself who is the better leader.

Trump didn’t play it safe. Davies, meanwhile, didn’t risk anything when his country needed him most in the biggest ever Canadian soccer game. Failing is not as bad as not even trying.

Meanwhile, Trump stuck up for his players and country when they were in need of someone to loudly protest. And protesting striker Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension for Monday night’s elimination game against Belgium was the appropriate call, no matter how many crybabies cry about it.

“Imagine if another government and world leader did this to disadvantage USA,” wrote Piers Morgan about Trump calling FIFA boss Gianni Infantino to protest the red-card suspension, adding in another post that “this will be the biggest story, and potential scandal, of the World Cup.”

Even Infantino in an X post explained that, while he gets calls from world leaders, including Trump, the FIFA governance rules independently.

Red card not as powerful as Trump card?

But the bigger scandal is why a red card was called on America’s top World Cup scorer in the first place.

Said Trump in the Oval Office on Monday: “All I did, I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul.”

There’s nothing wrong with Trump doing that.

Free speech.

FIFA is not facing the same scrutiny for reducing Portugal great Cristiano Ronaldo’s earlier 2025 suspension from three games to one to make sure he played in the World Cup. At the core of the sour grapes is just jealously of the United States — hence the disgraceful booing of the Star Spangled Banner in Houston prior to the Canada-Morocco game and cruel shots at America in opinion columns like the one my pal Warren Kinsella wrote in the Sun to mark July 4.

“America alights in its 250th year with … no discernible joy, no proper celebrations, no singing by anyone you would ever want to hear” and “uncharitable as it may sound, America slides into its 250th year like a dead and decomposing whale on a remote beach somewhere, foul and desiccated, but too big to easily remove” while “wondering if we should blow it up, like in a YouTube video, or just wait for the tide take it back,” he wrote.

Having participated in some of this year’s festivities stateside, I hugely differ from Warren’s dark assessment and found America’s 250th to be as great as I remember the 200th being, and enjoyed the military bands and singers and the amazing fireworks. I marvelled at the booming, robust tourism going on there with fans from around the world.

Everybody I met in Boston — people from Scotland, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Mexico, Cabo Verde, Australia, South Africa and Canada — all had the same opinion we found with FIFA visitors to Canada : With the World Cup and their birthday, they all said “America did great” and “America is great.”

They are right. Like Canada and Mexico, what a World Cup show America has put on.

Canada’s leader hid, while America’s led

All the moaning and booing in the world won’t change the fact when the U.S. needed their leader to fight for an injustice, he was there for them.

To Trump’s point, you want the best players on the field for the biggest games, and Balogun “didn’t do anything wrong, and he’s our best player,” Trump said. “It’s one thing to penalize someone for the game, but how do you penalize them for a game that hasn’t even been played yet? It’s very unfair. You can’t do that. So yes, I asked for a review by FIFA.”

He did what Davies should have done. He entered the game when he was needed.

It will be ironic if it ends up being President Donald J. Trump who finally ends soccer’s asinine red-card rule that automatically suspends a player the next game. Once again, the Trump haters did what they do best: Hate.

There is no point in holding a Trump card if you are never going to pull it out and use it. No matter the score against Belgium, the facts show the Americans have a captain who is prepared to go to the wall for them while Canada’s stayed on the sidelines.

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