LA Times columnist urges city to abandon 2028 Olympics over Trump role

A Los Angeles Times columnist urged the city of L.A. to abandon the 2028 Olympics over concerns about President Donald Trump’s involvement.

In a new column for the outlet, Gustavo Arellano lamented that Trump will be heading the task force in charge of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and warned the president would use the spectacle and the city for his own agenda.

“That’s why L.A. needs to withdraw from hosting the Olympics — the sooner the better,” Arellano wrote.

Arellano said when Los Angeles 2028, the group tasked with organizing the Olympics in the city, chair Casey Wasserman announced Trump as head of the task force, it was like him offering the city a “giant whoopi cushion.” 

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The columnist went on to trash other top officials from the Trump administration who were present at the announcement. 

“On Trump’s right was a rash of L.A. haters, some of whom played a prominent role in Southern California’s summer of deportations, including Vice President JD Vance and Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem,” he wrote. “Not present, but hailed by Trump during the presser as an ‘MVP candidate,’ was Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has made it his life’s mission to crush the multicultural metropolis that birthed him.”

Wasserman’s praise for Trump was, according to Arellano, nothing short of groveling.

“I haven’t seen such a suck-up since the last time I vacuumed my dad’s pool,” he wrote. “And you definitely don’t entrust kiss a– like Wasserman — I’m still not sure what he did to deserve his powerful LA28 gig, except being the grandson of the late Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman — with calming down someone like Trump.”

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President Donald Trump delivers remarks after signing an executive order to create a White House Olympics task force to handle security and other issues related to the LA 2028 summer Olympic Games on Aug. 5, 2025. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/TPX Images of the Day)

Arellano noted how the federal government was always going to be involved with hosting the Olympic Games but said that the fact that Trump is part of it makes it problematic.

“The federal government was always going to play a role in providing security for the 2028 Olympics, just as it has for previous Games in the U.S. But Trump, as the head of the task force, now gets to personally oversee our own siege,” he wrote. “With the Games happening in a presidential election year, Trump would love nothing more than to traipse around an L.A. radically transformed by his deportation blitzkrieg to proclaim his mission accomplished and broadcast his conquest to the world.”

He also warned that Trump would use the next three years of Olympics prep to “humiliate blue L.A. at every chance.”

Arellano asked readers if they wanted to give Trump and his “goon squad” more opportunities to make life “miserable” in Los Angeles. 

He said he’d rather forego the city hosting the games because “I don’t want my money going toward something that Trump will use to bolster his noxious legacy. I’m not going to cheer on Wasserman as he chums up Trump while la migra continues to terrorize L.A., possibly for months, if not years.”

“La Migra” is a Spanish language term, often used in slang, that refers to U.S. immigration enforcement agencies, primarily U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol.

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“I don’t want to support an event where footage of an occupied L.A. might be as front and center as the Coliseum or badminton. What true Angeleno would?” he added. 

The 2028 Summer Olympics will be held July 14 to 30. L.A. was announced as the host city in 2017.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

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