“HAS not Goering admitted that the Games will be used for propagating the new Germany of Hitler? Is that the purpose of the Olympic Games, or are they designed to encourage the fraternity of peoples?”

George Sinfield of the Morning Star’s forerunner the Daily Worker posed this question in its July 20 1936 edition, explaining the Worker’s call for a boycott of the Berlin Olympics and support instead for the grassroots People’s Olympiad planned to take place in Barcelona in Republican Spain.

Similar questions have often been asked since, with “sportswashing” an established way for repressive regimes to launder their reputations.

The Morning Star has always been cautious about calls to boycott sporting events, or exclude countries from them.

Sport can promote cultural exchange across borders; familiarity with civilian rather than political representatives of foreign countries helps counter the othering of official enemies. That’s especially valuable in a world lurching towards war, and the Christmas Day football game between British and German soldiers in the trenches is one of the best-loved stories of World War I.

Boycotts are also used to further the political agenda of the Western powers which dominate global governing bodies: the hypocrisy of banning Russia from competitions over Ukraine while refusing to penalise Israel over Gaza has been widely condemned.

But Donald Trump’s US hosting the bulk of the 2026 Men’s World Cup is a different matter.

His brutality and venality is clear from the endorsement of ethnic cleansing in Gaza to the corporate-dominated “Board of Peace,” from the bombing of Iranian schoolgirls to the kidnap of Venezuela’s president.

The People’s Olympiad never took place because the Nazi-backed fascist revolt against democracy engulfed Spain before it could. Trump’s US threatens violent regime change against Cuba even as it invites the world to enjoy its hospitality.

Some of the world, anyway. This is the most exclusionary World Cup ever. Trump’s travel bans on dozens of countries block access to fans, journalists and athletes’ families. Even a Fifa-selected referee from Somalia, Omar Artan, has been denied entry.

Trump has threatened fans from Iran, whose team’s entire allocation of tickets has now been withdrawn days before the competition begins. His murderous, revamped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency has stepped up repression around host cities.

And hospitality may not be the correct term for the most extortionate World Cup in history either.

The first use of “dynamic pricing” has seen the cost of tickets soar, some selling for tens of thousands of dollars and pricing out working-class fans.

Prices have been ratcheted up for travel to stadiums — already expensive given the vast distances between them, also of environmental concern — and every effort made to squeeze fans for every penny, even with a mooted ban on bringing your own water to matches.

Many Morning Star columnists have considered the toxic consequences of the commercialisation of the “beautiful game.” The 2026 World Cup is capitalist extortion incarnate, everything wrong with modern football sold as something to celebrate.

And Fifa has aligned itself openly with a warmongering, racist presidency, one actively backing far-right movements across the world — including in Britain.

It even invented a new “Fifa Peace Prize” so boss Gianni Infantino could award it to a president who has bombed 10 countries in his second term, threatened to annex his neighbours and is ordering vast increases in what is already by far the world’s biggest military budget. Sportswashing is too weak a term.

Trump is not Hitler, but there are parallels with the 1936 Olympics: this is no mere rogue state, but an aggressive superpower plunging the world into a new dark age.

Waking up to the scale of the threat he poses means opposing the normalisation of his regime. The Morning Star will not be covering World Cup matches in the United States and calls for this competition to be boycotted.