Trump Is Weaponizing the Games Against Los Angeles
Co-published by Zócalo Public Square.
This show must not go on.
It’s time, right now, for greater Los Angeles to halt all preparations to host the 2028 Summer Olympics. Let’s step away, and turn over these Games to a world city better positioned to host them.
Not because we don’t love the Olympics. We are a proud Olympic city, shaped by the 1932 and 1984 Games. In normal times, our incomparable international connections, entertainment assets, and sports facilities would allow us to host what LA28 chair Casey Wasserman calls:
“the largest peacetime gathering in the history of the world.”
But it’s no longer peacetime in Los Angeles.
Holding this mega-event is simply too dangerous for Southern California, its security, its economy, and its democracy.
Hosting an Olympic Games requires Los Angeles to work together with a lawless U.S. regime—and its rights-violating security apparatus—as they openly wage war against our city and state.
“National Special Security Events,” like the Olympics and the Super Bowl, require host cities’ full cooperation with national security agencies. This means that federal agencies take the lead in protecting the Games and their host city from the crime and terrorism that such events attract. For the 2028 Olympics, an agreement, which took effect last year, puts the U.S. Secret Service in charge of security, with support from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
All those agencies work for Donald Trump, who has launched a war against California that includes deploying troops in our neighborhoods. And the Department of Homeland Security includes ICE and Border Patrol, two agencies that are acting like secret police, seizing Angelenos off the streets without warrants or probable cause, whether they are immigrants or not.
California leaders have righteously demanded that the raids end and the troops leave, and vast swaths of the American public agree. But those demands are incompatible with the Olympics agreement, which gives these agencies the power to surge security personnel into Los Angeles.
For an Olympics to work, federal officials and local leaders must collaborate.
Instead, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are threatening to arrest Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and remove them from office. Trump officials say they will do as they please in California and L.A., no matter what Angelenos or their representatives want.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explicitly linked today’s federal occupation of L.A. with the 2028 Olympics. He recently declared that Bass and Newsom, by defending protesters instead of ICE agents, forced the feds to take over the city.
“If this was a preview of their leadership ahead of next year’s World Cup games and the L.A. 2028 Olympics, we have bigger problems,” Duffy said.
It all may sound like the usual Trumpian nonsense, but senior L.A. officials are taking such statements seriously. Some California leaders are citing the need to hold a safe Olympics to justify partnerships with the very federal agencies now attacking California.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, in his eagerness to go forward with the Games, has come to resemble the prisoner-of-war Colonel Nicholson in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, who proudly uses his British engineering know-how to build a railroad bridge even though it aids his Japanese captors.
McDonnell frequently refers to ICE and Homeland Security agencies as “law enforcement partners,” despite their attacks on the city that he is sworn to protect. Pressed by the L.A. City Council on why he was still working with ICE, McDonnell replied:
“Without that partnership, we wouldn’t be able to go into the World Cup, the Olympics.”
McDonnell’s priorities are out of whack. He needs to focus on defending his city from the ongoing federal attack, not working with the feds to put on a party in three years.
Such weakness demonstrates how Trump can use the Olympics against California.
That’s why it’s urgent that California take away the president’s leverage by immediately hitting pause, and following up with a deadline and clear demands: We will abandon these Olympics by August 1 unless the Trump administration stops all immigration raids, removes all federal troops deployed to Los Angeles, releases all immigration detainees, supports a special prosecutor (selected by California’s congressional delegation) to investigate the raids, compensates California for all costs of the federal actions, restores all frozen or delayed federal funding, and covers the full cost of all emergencies, starting with January’s L.A. fires.
Anything less, and we’re out.
If we drop the Games, we’d anger and disappoint sports officials worldwide, but save ourselves all kinds of headaches—not least financial. In retiring from city government recently, longtime administrator Rick Cole asked:
“If we can’t pave our streets, repair our sidewalks, trim our trees, house our homeless, light our bridges, and fix our firetrucks, how can we host an Olympics in just three years?”
Unexpected expenses from the Games could hurt public budgets that are already in deficit. (L.A. and the state each have to cover $270 million of any cost overruns.) And Trump, who has a long history of failing to pay his bills, could use the Olympics to inflict additional damage on Los Angeles—by trying to stick L.A. or California with billions in federal security costs.
Trump is also destroying the Games’ potential upside. The Olympics can make money if people all over the world come to see them. But Trump’s travel ban—and his regime’s willingness to detain and jail tourists—will discourage attendance. Some countries may even boycott. How many global corporations, whose sponsorships provide considerable funding for the Games, will want to be associated with all this controversy?
But the biggest threat posed by an Olympics in the Trump era is not financial. It’s the threat to our democracy.
Trump has indicated that he intends to use the Games to celebrate himself and consolidate his authoritarian regime. Expect to see Trump lighting the torch while sitting in the stands with his fellow autocrats—Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Orbán, India’s Modi, maybe Russia’s Putin.
Indeed, the 2028 Games could take place while Trump is campaigning, as he has suggested he might, for an unconstitutional third term as president. Tyrants have used the Olympics in this way before—Google “Adolf Hitler” and “1936 Berlin Olympics.”
Why on earth should Californians spend our precious time and money on a fascist pageant for our oppressor and occupier?
Despite all the reasons to cancel, I recognize that backing away from the Olympics will be hard, especially for Los Angeles. The old showbiz adage “the show must go on” defines our city. We’ve put on major events during emergencies before, including the 1932 Olympics amidst the Great Depression. And L.A. has tied ambitious civic projects—notably, expanding Metro rail —to these Games.
But this situation is different, and dangerous, especially if federal agencies use the Games to violate the rights of Angelenos, triggering protests. No city has ever held the Olympics while defending itself from a war waged by its national government. If the 2028 Olympics go forward in L.A., the Games will be little more than a weapon in Trump’s lawless fight against us.
