ANDREW GIULIANI: How President Trump’s World Cup vision showed America at its very best

Andrew Giuliani writing a valentine to his old boss's World Cup planning is not exactly a shock, but the underlying numbers are worth pulling apart on their own. Six hundred twenty five million for security, half a billion for counter drone technology. That is not small ball. That is the federal government treating a soccer tournament like a national security event, which, frankly, in 2026, it probably is. Drones over stadiums are not a hypothetical anymore. Anyone who has watched what's happened at sporting events and public gatherings overseas knows why a task force would want that money locked in early rather than scrambling six months out.

Where we'd push back is on turning a budget line into a personality cult moment. The piece reads like the spending itself proves some larger point about American greatness, when really it just proves the administration understood the assignment: this is the biggest sporting event on earth, spread across dozens of cities, and it needed real money and real coordination before a single ticket sold. That's competence, not a vision statement. Competence is good. It doesn't need a victory lap dressed up as one.

Still, give credit where it's due. Getting counter drone infrastructure funded and moving this far ahead of kickoff is the kind of unglamorous groundwork that actually protects people, and it's the sort of thing nobody notices unless it goes wrong. If the tournament comes off safely next summer, nobody will remember the line item. They'll just remember the games. That's usually how good security funding works: invisible when it's working, catastrophic front-page news when it isn't.