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Life goes on, but it's different for some. Donald Trump plays golf while the urban poorest live in homeless encampments.."Sportswashing" may hide reality for some but it will take more than sport anesthesia to erase awareness of chasmic economic gaps in Toronto and beyond. Trump rails against dangerous cities and their inhabitants while his regular golf rounds apparently wipe out any expressions of sympathy for those unable and unlikely ever to play the president's favourite game.      

Meanwhile, in his recent threat to remove 2026 World Cup matches from “dangerous cities”  Donald Trump continues his rhetorical appropriation of the tournament by his class based politics of polemical division while contributing to a growing tide of “sportwashing” by tyrannical regimes. It is of course par for the course for Trump, with his barely disguised war on American inner  cities heavily populated by racially diverse and poor communities. Trump’s racist and classist insinuations about inner cities are well known, but football, the people’s game, should be spared interpolations from his elevated and hostile political pinnacle. Trump off!, Donald is the TorontotheBetter response on behalf of lovers of “the people’s game” to the golf dedicated current president. TorontotheBetter pledges continuing responses to such predictable incursions into territory beyond his scope or capabilities. By inviting Trump to officiate at World  Cup events FIFA resident Infantino seems lamentably to be continuing FIFA’s elevation of money and celebrity above the core values of the game that animate athletic engagement by people worldwide, whatever their income, gender or age.