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- Belgium’s Trump Dance Exposed the Collapse of the President’s Soft Power
Moments after scoring Belgium’s fourth goal against the hapless US Men’s National Soccer Team, Romelu Lukaku ran to the corner flag and joined his teammates in a mocking Trump Dance. The scene was repeated soon after in the Belgium locker room, this time as they sang the Village People’s “YMCA”—a staple of the US president’s political rallies. It was a final humiliation on one of the worst days in US soccer history. It was also a sign of how quickly things have changed—of how toxic Donald Trump’s attempts to rig everything from the economy to soccer tournaments have become. Back in 2024, right after Trump was elected for the second time, his signature dance move was everywhere. NFL stars, third-tier British professional soccer players, and even Team USA’s own Christian Pulisic and his teammates were seen celebrating with the stunted boogie. The dance’s cultural emergence was an indicator of Trump’s personal soft power as he reclaimed the White House in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and multiple criminal prosecutions. But now—18 months into a second term marked by chaos, corruption, and war—Trump’s brand has been reduced to a symbol of American failure. WATCH: Belgium players do President Trump’s ‘YMCA’ dance after eliminating the US from the World Cup pic.twitter.com/dA2rAbDwRR— Politics Global (@PolitlcsGlobal) July 7, 2026 But as this fiasco makes clear, Trump’s no longer able to convince the world to dance along. The USMNT is not new to humiliation or drama. The team crashed out of World Cup group stages in 1998 and 2006 and failed to even qualify for the tournament in 2018. Its 2022 campaign ended in the bizarre “ReynaGate” controversy. But none of that compares to what happened in the week between the USMNT’s triumph against Bosnia & Herzegovina and its lopsided loss to Belgium Monday night. In the Bosnia game, US striker Folarin Balogun received a controversial red card just past halftime, leaving the US down a man as it clung to a narrow lead. Throughout the rest of the match, the team showed a fight and grittiness that propelled it to a historic win. But the red card meant that Balogun—the team’s leading scorer—would miss the Round of 16 match against Belgium. The next day, Trump called Gianni Infantino—the FIFA President who infamously awarded Trump a knock-off “peace prize”—to discuss Balogun’s red card, according to Politico. This was followed… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago - Kentucky Governor Asks Mitch McConnell To ‘Fully Update’ People On His Healt...
Nobody has publicly seen or heard from the 84-year-old Republican senator since his mysterious hospitalization three weeks ago. [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago - Me, Myself, and IUDsLast summer, I noticed a shift: I was calmer and happier than I’d been in years. This was puzzling, since my life didn’t look particularly calm. I was planning a solo cross-country move, and my days were full of bubble wrap and goodbye dinners and Craigslist alerts. But as I packed up boxes in Boston, and then adjusted to life in San Francisco, I marveled at the little changes. Feeling content, rather than lonely, on nights cooking a new recipe by myself. Pausing to chat with baristas instead of rushing to order a latte. I couldn’t remember crying out of happiness before, but there I was on a morning walk, eyes welling at the way the sun hit a cypress tree. Friends and family said I seemed lighter. As the summer progressed, I wrote journal entries like, “felt relaxed/happy a lot of the day for no particular reason” and “surprised by how ok I am.” Since I was a teenager, I’ve grappled with a tangle of anxiety, depression, and insomnia: feeling a knot at the base of my ribs, weeping in the fetal position for no obvious reason, waking up in the middle of the night, simultaneously exhausted and wired. Over the years, I have, as therapists like to say, amassed the tools in my toolbox. I’ve spent countless hours with psychiatrists and therapists, gravitating toward cool grandma types, taking their advice to cultivate a mindfulness practice. I’ve talked to my actual grandma, a vivacious 102-year-old psychologist who has a way of asking pointed questions over breakfast. (On insomnia: “Does sex help?”) I’ve tried Prozac and Zoloft and Ambien. I run a few miles every day after work—the best mood booster I’ve found so far. I’ve even tried some of the more out-there stuff, like working with a coach to ask my stomach why it’s so tense. But when the knot and the crying jags and the inexplicably wired nights persisted, I came to think of them as just how I was built. In the same way that I have dark hair and brown eyes, I thought, I was a person with a low hum of anxiety and bouts of depression. So it was particularly noticeable when things shifted. It wasn’t that I suddenly transformed; rather, it felt like the temperature of the anxiety came down, and sadness became a feeling that passed rather than a state of being.… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
- Trump Says He’ll Fast-Track Private Gas Plants to Power AI Data CentersThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In brief remarks to reporters Monday at the White House, President Donald Trump noted that he was shocked to learn how much energy developing artificial intelligence requires and said his administration is now approving plans for energy facilities to power data centers in “a matter of weeks.” After first describing his investment accounts for children, Trump responded to a question on cryptocurrency and said Big Tech leaders racing to develop artificial intelligence have told him they need access to double the country’s existing energy capacity in order to advance technologies and outpace foreign competitors. Trump also said that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin had told him tech companies weren’t taking advantage of the administration’s promise to get fast approvals for private power plants supporting AI development. “An industry of the future should not be chained to dirty fuels of the past.” Trump said he then called Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk to ask why they hadn’t submitted plans for power plants alongside their data center developments. “They thought we were kidding,” Trump said Monday. “They can’t believe it, that they’re approved in a period of a matter of weeks.” The White House did not immediately respond to questions about how the administration is approving power plant plans in a matter of weeks. While the administration has sought to waive environmental protections, expedite permits, and loosen construction rules for gas plants and data centers, there are a slew of state and local requirements both power plants and data centers must satisfy that even in the fastest permitting environments take months. Although Trump said it was his idea to allow tech companies to build their own “behind-the-meter” generating units on site to power data, it’s a mainstream practice to ensure they always have access to power. Dedicated power plants for data centers have only grown in popularity as companies race to get the facilities online. The president said tech companies can use whichever type of energy they want to use—he specifically mentioned only nuclear, oil and gas—except wind. “We don’t allow wind,” Trump said. “Wind is terrible, it just doesn’t work.” Trump has sought to end wind energy, the resource that generates a tenth of the electricity generated in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The race to develop… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
- DOGE Ended on July 4, but the Workers Whose Lives Musk Upended Are Still ReelingWhen Lucy found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2025, she might have been delighted. Instead, the news added to the uncertainty she’d been facing since that February, when she was among the first crop of federal workers fired by the Trump administration. Her old bosses at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to rehire her, but human resources offered nothing in writing, and given how the administration had treated her already, she just couldn’t trust the proposal. (She would eventually return as a contractor, hence her request that I use a pseudonym—one former colleague, after all, had been fired for putting up a protest sign.) The survey of fired federal workers “came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was.” President Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly that the career workers his minions drove out—roughly 317,000 were fired, quit, or took a buyout since he returned to the White House—are “getting private sector jobs” and making “twice as much money, three times as much money.” Even the judge who ruled those early firings illegal was under that impression. The workers “have moved on with their lives and found new jobs,” he stated last fall. “Many would no longer be willing or able to return to their posts.” That wasn’t Lucy’s experience. She’d applied for at least 80 positions, resulting in just two dead-end interviews, though her PhD and ample work experience had made her well-qualified. By the time she knew she was expecting, she’d accepted a retail gig without health insurance. Similar stories abounded among her former colleagues. I, too, left a job at the NIH last year—voluntarily, having seen the writing on the wall. My old workmates and I keep in touch via a group Signal chat, which, in addition to hand-drawn protest signs and pictures of pets, has been populated with tips for job seekers, mutual aid info, and countless employment postings. Lucy, whom I hadn’t met prior to reporting this story, figured she wasn’t an outlier in terms of her difficulties finding suitable work. As the anniversary of the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre approached, the members of one of her Signal chats began talking about designing a survey to assess how ejected workers were really faring. Among the laid-off workers were plenty of people skilled in collecting and analyzing data—including Lucy, an… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
- The UFC Cage Match Theory of Democracy
In June, a huge, eight-sided cage went up on the South Lawn of the White House, obscuring the façade of the storied building President Donald Trump has treated as his personal mansion. Intended for an Ultimate Fighting Championship series of mixed martial arts matches held on the president’s 80th birthday, the structure was Trump’s gift to himself, capping a months-long binge of relentlessly gaudifying America’s highest office. Naysayers were reminded that the event was, of course, also a celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday. The invite-only spectacle, with a price tag of over $60 million, had around 4,000 guests, with thousands more watching on big screens in the White House Ellipse. In a TikTok video, Trump compared his arena to the Eiffel Tower and mused that it might never come down. Kim Phillips-Fein. Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. Norton, 304 pp. No better time, then, to remind ourselves that it was precisely during the month of June, 250 years ago, that Thomas Jefferson, in the sweltering heat of an early Philadelphia summer, was drafting the Declaration of Independence. The three truths Jefferson considered “self-evident”––“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—seem not so assured anymore. Maybe they never really were, suggests Kim Phillips-Fein, the liberal historian, in Country of Lords, her sweeping new study of the fate of the first of Jefferson’s hallowed truths: equality, or, as she defines it, “egalitarianism.” Even as Jefferson was imagining, in Lincoln’s wonderful phrase, the “electric cord” of equality binding together his new nation, some of his contemporaries were severing it. Fellow founder John Adams called attempts to erase the natural differences between the rich and the poor a “glaring … imposition.” He was not alone in his concerns: The majority of states initially tied the right to vote to property ownership. A crucial test case for arguments in favor of equality was, of course, chattel slavery. Jefferson had already failed it, holding on to his slaves even as he proclaimed his gospel of egalitarianism. As Phillips-Fein mentions, he had some ugly things to say about Black people in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “In reason much inferior” to Whites, he wrote, they would never understand “the… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
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