The IOC handed LA the Olympics. Now Trump is weaponizing them

The Guardian

a day ago

When the International Olympic Committee first handed Los Angeles the 2028 Summer Olympics back in 2017, IOC president Thomas Bach called it 'a golden opportunity' for all involved. Fast forward to last month when Kirsty Coventry took the reins from Bach at the IOC. So much has changed.
In January, LA was hit with deadly wildfires. That same month a different sort of natural disaster took shape as Donald Trump returned to the White House. Bach had previously praised LA for its 'strong foundation', but that foundation has crumbled under the weight of the wildfires, a citywide budget crisis and an erratic president whose marauding Immigration and Customs Enforcement look like they arrived straight from robbing a liquor store to instill fear across Los Angeles.
The LA28 Olympics are now a slow-motion train wreck.
Just ahead of his inauguration, Trump assured Casey Wasserman, the chair of the LA28 Olympic Organizing Committee, that 'These are America's Olympics,' adding, 'These are more important than ever to LA and I'm going to be supportive in every way possible and make them the greatest Games.' Then, in March, speaking to the IOC, Wasserman insisted that 'irrespective of politics today, America will be open and accepting to all 209 countries for the Olympics.' He added, 'LA is the most diverse city in the history of humanity and we will welcome the people from around the world and give them all a great time.'
On one hand, that may be true. Trump is not likely to squander an opportunity to engage in sportswashing: using sports to self-aggrandize on the global stage while stoking nationalism, bolstering the state security apparatus and deflecting attention from domestic social problems. Trump frequently yammers about how the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics and the 2026 World Cup are among the events in his second term that gets his fascist heart a-tittering the quickest. Staging the mega-events is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to appear important on the world stage. Moreover, during Trump's first term, he assured LA28 Olympic organizers that the federal government would supply security to protect the event.
On the other hand, to say Trump is erratic is to make an Olympian understatement. Plus, he has an in-built incentive to make life hard for California governor Gavin Newsom – his perpetual nemesis and a possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate – and LA's left-of-center mayor Karen Bass. Last month, vice-president JD Vance parachuted into LA and immediately slid into attack-dog mode, calling the activist pushback against Ice raids 'a tragedy' of Newsom and Bass's making. 'You had people who were doing the simple job of enforcing the law,' he said, 'and you had rioters, egged on by the governor and the mayor, making it harder for them to do their job.'
Angelenos are at the Trump administration's mercy in other ways, too. Olympic organizers are banking on scoring around $3.2bn in federal funding for transportation that's crucial to the Games running smoothly. But Trump's transportation secretary Sean Duffy recently threatened to cut off funding for cities like LA that have experienced anti-Ice protests. A federal judge issued a temporary order pausing the plan, but congressional Republicans hold tremendous leverage over the fiscal spigot, and this is a clear stick-it-to-the-libs moment they are unlikely to fritter away.
But even more alarming is the fact that Trump and Vance have a secret weapon in their arsenal: the National Special Security Event designation, or NSSE. When an event such as the Olympics, a Super Bowl or an egotistic military parade is designated as an NSSE by a president or their Department of Homeland Security, it triggers widespread latitude for a bevy of federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Few know this but the NSSE for the Los Angeles 2028 is already in effect. In 2024, then-president Joe Biden designated the LA28 Olympics a 'National Special Security Event', some four full years ahead of the Games – the furthest in advance of an event since Bill Clinton concocted the designation in the late 1990s.
Everyday people in Los Angeles, as well as their elected officials, need to wake up to the reality that this relatively unknown acronym is about to change their life, if it is not already changing it. After all, some 900,000 undocumented people live in LA, according to the University of Southern California.
Let's be clear, the National Special Security Event status only emboldens impunity. The security crackdown on Ice protests, featuring the National Guard and Marines, offers Angelenos a frontal view at what that mega-event 'security' might look like over the next three years.
NSSEs enable also secrecy. When LA city council member Imelda Padilla recently asked Los Angeles Police Department chief Jim McDonnell whether he'd be willing to warn city officials if he got wind of upcoming federal immigration raids. McDonnell's response raised alarm bells: 'You're asking me to warn you about an enforcement action being taken by another agency before it happens? We can't do that.' He added, 'That would be completely inappropriate and illegal.' But is this stance just standard-issue obstruction-of-justice pap? Or is it entangled with the hierarchies of the National Special Security event?
McConnell may have offered us a hint when he said, 'All of the crimes we investigate potentially could be in partnership with [federal agencies],' The police chief added, 'It is a partnership, and without that partnership, we wouldn't be able to go into the World Cup, the Olympics ... that require that we work with federal, state and local partners.' Big questions linger about how the NSSE designation is already affecting policing in LA. The closer we get to the Olympics, the more urgent this issue will become.
To further complicate matters for LA28 Olympic organizers, the Trump administration hatched plans to institute a fresh travel ban that affects countries like Iran, Haiti and Libya. Then, it announced that an additional 36 countries could be subjected to its travel ban. Every single country listed on Trump's travel ban lists – all 48 of them – sent athletes to the Paris 2024 Games.
Then the Trump administration denied visas to players and staff from Senegal's women's basketball team, forcing the squad to cancel its trip. The team had planned a training camp in the US to ready itself for LA 2028 Olympic qualifiers.
What a time for Kirsty Coventry to take over at the IOC. The first woman and first African – she hails from Zimbabwe – elected to the presidency, Coventry faces a misogynist and bully in Donald Trump. The Olympic Charter states plainly that 'the IOC's role' in accordance with its mission, is 'to act against any form of discrimination affecting the Olympic Movement'. Will Coventry stand up to Trump and defend these principles? That's what real leadership would look like. And only then would a new era at the IOC truly begin.