A World Cup for a Divided Continent

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Eight years ago, when FIFA selected the United States, Mexico, and Canada to host the 2026 World Cup, the organization imagined a sprawling tournament that would reflect a strong partnership and solidarity among the countries. Three nations would co-host the matches for the first time in the tournament’s history, and millions of fans would travel across borders to watch.That vision of unity has not aged well. The games are set to start tomorrow, but immigration restrictions, trade disputes, security concerns, and a new wave of U.S. nationalism under President Trump have resulted in an unusual geopolitical experiment: a World Cup that will test how divided North America has become.“Few things can connect societies like a joint World Cup bid,” Arturo Sarukhán, a former ambassador of Mexico to the U.S., told me. He had advocated for this joint tournament bid, and had understood it as a chance to show the “optimism” and “shared prosperity” of the continent. The tri-host tournament was proposed in 2017, in a document titled the “United Bid”—a name that seems quaint today. Jules Boykoff, a political scientist at Pacific University, in Oregon, and the author of a book about the 2026 World Cup, told me that in private conversations around the time of the bid, there was a sense that Trump wouldn’t be around by the time the World Cup commenced.When that assumption didn’t pan out, the tournament faced a litany of new challenges. Since taking office again, Trump has disregarded long-standing continental alliances. The three countries, in some ways, were once closely tied: The now-defunct North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) knit their economies together for a quarter-century. They share borders, and the U.S. is home to the world’s largest Mexican expatriate community. “Even if