President Donald Trump suggested he might have to move the 2028 Summer Games from Los Angeles.
While answering a reporter’s question Tuesday about the seven FIFA World Cup 2026 soccer matches being held in Boston amid tensions with the city’s Democratic mayor, the president said he’d have to move the matches somewhere else if there were “unsafe conditions.”
Then Trump raised the possibility of relocating the LA Games.
“I could say the same thing for the Olympics because we have events that are in different locations for the Olympics. It’s based in LA,” the president said. “If I thought LA was not going to be prepared properly, I would move it to another location, if I had to.”
He added, “For that one, I’d probably have to get a different kind of a permission, but we would do that,” an apparent reference to Los Angeles’ contract with the International Olympic Committee to host the next U.S. Games.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed a similar contract with the IOC on behalf of the state to host the 2034 Winter Games. Utah’s contract spells out what would allow the IOC to drop the state as a host, including newly added language surrounding an anti-doping controversy.
The LA Games “have the full support of the President of the United States, the Governor of California and the Mayor of Los Angeles,” an IOC spokesperson said in a statement to the Deseret News.
“All of them are being extremely helpful in the preparations for these Games. This is mirrored on the operational level of the administration. There are three years to go, and we are confident that LA28 will be great Olympic Games,” the statement concluded.
The president signed an executive order in August creating a White House task force on the 2028 Summer Games with himself as its leader. Trump’s massive tax and spending cut bill, passed earlier this year, contained $1 billion for the Games.
Trump appeared to acknowledge that the head of the international football, or soccer, federation known as FIFA would have to make the call on the Boston matches, set to be held in Gillette Stadium in nearby Foxborough, Massachusetts.
“I love the people of Boston. I know the games are sold out, but your mayor is not good," the president said, criticizing Boston Mayor Michelle Wu as being “radical left” and afraid for political reasons to “take back” the city.
“If somebody is doing a bad job and if I feel there’s unsafe conditions, I would call Gianni (Infantino), the head of FIFA, who’s phenomenal, and I would say, ‘Let’s move it to another location,’” Trump said. “And he would do that. He wouldn’t love to do it, but he’d do it, very easily he’d do it. And this is the right time to do it.”
Officials from FIFA have not yet responded to what the president said Tuesday. After Trump first talked in September about moving matches from any U.S. city deemed “even a little bit dangerous for the World Cup,” a FIFA vice president made it clear that’s not up to him.
“It’s FIFA’s tournament, FIFA’s jurisdiction, FIFA makes those decisions,” Victor Montagliani, who also heads the Confederation of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football, said earlier this month at a conference in London, The Guardian reported.
“With all due respect to current world leaders, football is bigger than them and football will survive their regime and their government and their slogans,” Montagliani said. “That’s the beauty of our game, that it is bigger than any individual and bigger than any country.”
Next year’s FIFA World Cup matches are also being held in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as in Mexico and Canada.
Wu pushed back against the president’s assertion, CBS News Boston reported.
“There’s no ability to take away the World Cup games,” Wu said Wednesday morning on the “Java With Jimmy” show. “There’s no real threat when it comes to saying cities are so unsafe that they can’t host the games.”
She said many months of planning have gone into preparing for the World Cup matches.
“Much of it is locked down by contract so that no single person, even if they live in the White House currently, can undo it,” Wu said, adding, ”We are going to continue to be who we are and that means unfortunately we are going to be, continue to be in the conversation in a way that is targeting Boston’s values."
Trump also used his response Tuesday at a meeting with Argentina President Javier Milei to go after another Democrat, California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“Gavin Newsom, he’s got to get his act together because had we not gone in at the beginning of my term ... with a very strong, powerful force, they would have lost LA. The city was going to be taken over,” he said, referring to his deployment of National Guard troops in response to protests against federal immigration raids.
“That was a rough one. That was nasty. If we saw a situation like that, we’d be forced to make a move,” Trump said. “Boston better clean up their act, that’s all I can say.”
National Guard troops have also been sent by the president to Washington, D.C., and Memphis, while their deployment to Chicago and Portland, Oregon, is being challenged. Like Los Angeles, all have Democratic mayors.
Newsom used his governor’s press office account on X to take on Trump’s statements about moving the LA Games, posting above a video of the president speaking, “Hey Don, if you send the Olympics to the UAE, will they give you another golf course?”
