On June 19, the U.S. men's national team beat Australia at Lumen Field in Seattle. The city's biggest newspaper responded by publishing a piece hunting for local soccer fans who plan to root against their own country for the rest of the tournament.

Not satire. The Seattle Times assigned reporter Daniel Beekman to find people in the Seattle area who are so mad about Donald Trump that they can't bring themselves to cheer for the red, white, and blue at the FIFA Men's World Cup.

Beekman's piece reads like a casting call for anti-American sentiment dressed up as sports journalism. The article profiles multiple Seattle-area fans wrestling with what should be the simplest question in international competition: do you want your country to win?

One fan, Carey Lefkowitz, told the paper, "I still want the U.S. team to win, but everything that goes with that? I'm conflicted." Everything that goes with that. Meaning the president. Meaning having to share a moment of national pride with people who voted differently than she did.

Another fan, Fio Bazo, offered this gem: "If the U.S. plays Germany, of course I'm going to root for the U.S. But if it's the U.S. against a small country..." She trailed off, but we get the picture. Rooting interests now depend on the geopolitical sympathy ranking of the opponent.

The piece brought in Sebastian Mayer, a 33-year-old politics lecturer at the University of Washington, to provide the academic gloss. "Since the World Cup began almost 100 years ago, many host-country leaders have used it to promote their political agendas," Mayer explained, referencing Argentina's 1978 military junta and the 2022 Qatar World Cup. The implication being that cheering for America in 2026 is somehow morally comparable to propping up a dictatorship.

To Beekman's credit — or perhaps to the story's — not everyone he found had abandoned ship. Sebastian Diaz, a 33-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Colombia who runs a South End soccer nonprofit called Cultures United, didn't seem interested in making the tournament about the Oval Office. And progressive fan Ken Langner, who has English ancestry, still roots for the Stars and Stripes despite his politics.

But the framing tells you everything. A major metropolitan daily didn't profile fans who are excited about hosting the World Cup. It didn't write about the atmosphere at Lumen Field or the team's chances in the knockout rounds. It went looking — specifically, deliberately — for people whose hatred of a president overrides their ability to root for twenty-three guys in American jerseys kicking a ball.

There was a time when international sports were the one thing that still unified the country for ninety minutes. The whole point of a national team is that it's bigger than whoever occupies the White House. You cheer because the shirt says USA, not because you personally endorsed every policy of the current administration.

The Seattle Times could have written that story. Instead, they wrote a permission slip for rooting against your own country and called it journalism.