IT’S COME TO THIS: LA Mayor Karen Bass issues World Cup threat in war with Trump over riots:

Mayor Karen Bass sent a message to Donald Trump claiming the response to the immigration protests will hurt the World Cup.

The United States is set to co-host the soccer showstopper along with Canada and Mexico next summer.

Bass, speaking at a press conference, said the city’s economy will ‘collapse’ if Trump deports more illegal migrants, and taunted him: ‘Don’t you want the World Cup to be a success for you?’

While it’s true that ESPN reported in March, “President Trump to lead 2026 World Cup task force,” Bass’s communist roots are really showing, if she thinks the former owner of a USFL team is worried all that much about soccer.

Meanwhile, as Joel Kotkin writes: Los Angeles has fallen. How can riot-rocked LA be trusted to host the Olympics?

But unless vast sums are spent on a Potemkin-like makeover, the world will also witness what many of us residents have long suspected – that the city is slipping into an inexorable decline.

Things were very different in 1932, when LA first hosted the Olympics. With a population of 1.2million – a third of today’s population – LA was still fledgling. But the 1932 games served as a wake-up call to the world that LA was on its way to becoming one of the planet’s great cities.

I covered the run-up to the second LA Olympics, in 1984. It was arguably the most successful games in history, despite Russia’s Cold War-era boycott. This was LA at its peak – with native son Ronald Reagan in the White House, and the defence, aerospace, housing and entertainment sectors all booming. ‘LA’s the place’, as the promoters then put it, and few could deny the truth of it.

Some may hope the new games will rescue the city from its doldrums. But numerous studies show that hosting an Olympics offers, at best, fleeting economic benefits – and often leaves enormous burdens. It can provide an opportunity to make a statement, heralding the rise of cities such as Berlin under the Nazis in 1936 or Beijing under the CCP in 2008. But staging an Olympics in a city plainly in decline seems a fool’s errand.

Detroit’s Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh would concur. This 1965 film, created to sell Detroit as a possible host of the 1968 Olympics, looks like something out of The Last Days of Pompeii when viewed in 2025:

Or perhaps the precursor to Bill Whittle’s new “How L.A. Dies” video: