Pablo Torre

To convey the tabs and the color-codedness and all of this and just the sound, which I think our microphones can pick up as I...

That's the sound of American exceptionalism.

I guess in figurative and also perhaps literal ways.

So from a big thousand foot view, I should say, I got to cover the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

And I got a sense on the ground of what I had heard from afar, which is,

There is a lot of money sloshing around here.

FIFA, for those not initiated, is the apex predator of notoriously corrupt sporting organizations.

But this story, as much as people may think, okay, yeah, you're talking about FIFA, corruption, Johnny Infantino, the head of FIFA, and President Donald Trump, we see them all the time exchanging golden objects.

Just the numbers on this in terms of how much FIFA is spending, we're looking at, again, just the basic math of it.

Operating budget, $1.12 billion.

The projected revenue, $11 billion.

And Infantino is saying it's $30.5 billion in terms of what the U.S.

economy would get.

Well, I want to bring us to what is different about this World Cup because this event is different from the ones that you and I have covered in the past.

Great merch, right?

Well, part of FIFA's American experiment is the understanding we can't just deal with Trump alone, actually.

It may seem like Trump is the key to everything because that is his own self-image and also what these videos suggest.

But part of what you are learning as a legal immigrant to this country is that

wait a minute, these states and cities, you got to go through them too.

And this is something that I myself didn't really think about until I started reading your reporting, which has been, I mean, at this point, quite endless.