A pension-pot World Cup looms and with Trump in the White House and a crown prince at his back, it is now a safe space
I
t was hard to choose one favourite photo from football’s double-header at the White House this week. In part this is because the pictures from Donald Trump’s state dinner with Mohammed bin Salman and his in-house hype men Cristiano Ronaldo and Gianni Infantino were everywhere, recycled feverishly across the internet, dusted with their own drool-stained commentary by the wider Ronaldo-verse.
Mainly there were just so many jaw-droppers. Perhaps you liked the one of Trump and Ronaldo strolling the halls of power, Ronaldo dressed all in black and laughing uproariously, like a really happy ninja. Or the one of Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez standing either side of a weirdly beaming Trump at his desk, holding up some kind of large heraldic key as though they’ve just been presented with their own wind-up wooden sex-grandad.
Perhaps you preferred footage of the dinner itself where even the air in the room looks thick and smudged and strange, the kind of room where you look down and notice the chair you’re sitting on is made out of human fingernails. There was the bit where Trump is giving a speech about all the “unbelievable dignitaries”, impresario-style, like he’s cutting the ribbon on a shopping mall in Boca Raton. As you look closer it becomes clear his hair has now decisively evolved from its previous form as a kind of flat orange hat and has gone full 1980s newsreader bouffant, so thick with spray and chemicals it’s closer to a kind of gauze, hair you could stick your hand in and then never get it out, like flypaper.
