Andrew Giuliani was haggling in a Florida hospital room, defending his presence to his recently comatose father — a man so stricken a short time earlier that a priest had been called.
At least dad sounded like himself again.
“What are you doing here?” former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani asked after waking earlier this month, according to Andrew Giuliani, who had scrambled south from Washington, where he holds a senior federal post conferred by a president whom he has described as a second father figure. “You’ve got to get your ass back up to D.C.”
Five weeks remained before the highest-stakes professional moment of Andrew Giuliani’s zigzagging, sometimes painful, increasingly consequential public life.
And President Trump had made his own expectations clear.
“You better do well, Andrew,” he said for the cameras last year, after making Mr. Giuliani the top-ranking administration official who once smiled at the boss through baby teeth.
Mr. Giuliani, 40, is the executive director of the White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup 2026 — the nation’s steward for what he has billed, with Trumpian (and not inaccurate) flair, as “the largest sporting event in the history of the world,” which begins next month.
The job would have been complicated enough before the war in Iran, one of the countries competing in the draw; or the 76-day homeland security shutdown that waylaid vital funding (and left Mr. Giuliani and much of his team unpaid); or the jittery incoming messages from blue host cities unsettled by Mr. Trump openly musing about relocating matches that have been planned for years.
But it has fallen to Mr. Giuliani, a Trump super-loyalist and regular golf partner who once played professionally, to reassure the soccer-loving masses that he is on the case, that the president hears their concerns, that everything will probably be fine.
“This guy,” Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, said in a recent Instagram video, pointing double finger-guns at Mr. Giuliani, “is in charge of making sure it goes smooth.”
To which more than a few MAGA-skeptical counterparties initially wondered: This guy is in charge of making sure it goes smooth?
“One didn’t know,” Mayor Quinton Lucas, Democrat of Kansas City, Mo., one of 11 American host cities, said diplomatically, “the seriousness with which the position would be taken.”
It is a golden age of world-conquering fathers and the sons who want their shot, of power and fortune accrued and expanded for the next generation without apology.
David Ellison, son of Larry, is building his media mega-empire. Alex and Zach Witkoff, sons of Steve, are pitching Middle East investors while their father negotiates regional peace. Jared Kushner, son of Charles (and son-in-law of the president), and Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have leveraged their connections in service of the evolving family business.
“As men,” Andrew Giuliani observed last year, suggesting that Barron Trump’s soccer fandom had rubbed off on his father, “we’re always either trying to make our parents or our kids proud of us.”
And as a man whose father’s associates still reflexively call him “kid” in interviews — whose early reputation congealed as the boy who famously interrupted his dad’s City Hall inauguration, charging the lectern to blow kisses and step on punchlines — Mr. Giuliani has procured the careful-what-you-wish-for job of a lifetime.
Weeks before the first match in the United States, outside Los Angeles on June 12, he is navigating the daily triage as Mr. Trump’s de facto ambassador to the world’s game and its grandest showcase: boundless security threats; visa concerns among the more than five million expected international visitors; local angst about aggressive immigration enforcement upending the tournament; relentless complaints about runaway ticket prices; and delicate coordination with the World Cup co-hosts, Canada and Mexico, whose relationships with the administration can be volatile.
“I can only liken it to juggling chain saws,” said Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser.
“We try to catch the handle as much as possible,” Mr. Giuliani, who served in Mr. Trump’s first term as a liaison to sports leagues, said in an 85-minute interview.
He prefers a different analogy, comparing himself to an offensive lineman in American football, mostly anonymous unless he bungles something.
“If I’m the story of the World Cup,” Mr. Giuliani said, “then the World Cup has not gone well.”
If the tournament goes smoothly, of course, the government will not have relied on Mr. Giuliani alone. Federal agencies and international soccer diplomats have spent years on some of the very issues that have more recently consumed his team.
Inside FIFA, that inscrutable nation-state of soccer hegemony, Mr. Giuliani’s appointment was viewed somewhat sneeringly. Leaders remain dubious of his experience and his Ted Lasso-esque grasp of their sport. (“I’ve been told ‘matches,’ not ‘games,’” Mr. Giuliani reminded himself with reporters last December. “I’m working on this right here.”)
Yet for Mr. Giuliani, the tournament is a rare opportunity in a life spent, by his own account, accepting rare opportunities.
Can he scribble over the man-child caricature, enshrined in a “Saturday Night Live” sendup, that has trailed him for decades?
Can he reward the patronage of a president who values little as much as the success of his own mass spectacle?
“Can Andrew do this?” Mr. Trump privately asked allies after Mr. Giuliani pitched himself for the position in the Oval Office last year.
If the answer is yes, it will be in no small part because Mr. Giuliani has been preparing for an uncommon role like this throughout his uncommon life.
By breeding and bearing, friends say, Mr. Giuliani is comfortable in spaces where it would never occur to him that he did not belong — swinging sand wedges with senators, mingling with Lionel Messi, subsisting in meetings where everyone else has a stately title.
“Mr. President, Secretary Rubio, Secretary Noem,” Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, began during a public World Cup discussion at the White House last year, acknowledging the luminaries beside him and hastening to add one more:
“Andrew.”
The toothy, excitable young son of New York’s toothy, excitable elected leader was about 9 or 10 when he slipped into a summit of almost unfathomable city royalty.
The sitting mayor. The Yankee boss. Joe DiMaggio. Donald J. Trump.
Andrew.
“It was a midsummer game,” he recalled, as if starting a novella, “in the old Yankee Stadium,” his and his father’s 1990s happy place, and Andrew Giuliani was wandering the ballpark suite of George Steinbrenner, the team owner, who had business to discuss with his father.
Mr. DiMaggio, the octogenarian Yankee legend, narrated the action on the field, Mr. Giuliani remembered, teaching the boy about defensive positioning. Mr. Trump shook his hand.
“One of those moments,” Mr. Giuliani said of the visit — and one of his first impressions of the future president.
It all seemed like a charmed way to grow up, so entrenching him in the culture that friends and colleagues still invoke, unprompted, the “S.N.L.” take on his inauguration performance.
“My dad’s mayor!” a bucktoothed Chris Farley had shouted, throwing the full force of his many pounds into an impression of a 7-year-old. “Oh yeahhhhhh.” (Mr. Giuliani has said he loved the bit.)
He became something of a municipal mascot, cheering beside his father at Yankees playoff games and the 1994 World Cup, the last time the tournament came to America. He chased fly balls across the lawn at Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence, with his younger sister, Caroline, and the family Labrador, Goalie, exhausting his security detail so thoroughly that they requested backup.
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“They’d say to me, ‘Curtis, do me a favor? Would you take the Wiffle ball bat and just hit it out there?’” recalled Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder whom the mayor had unofficially named his commissioner of stickball. “Boy, that kid wore out the grass.”
By adolescence, Mr. Giuliani had grown savvy and capable enough to hustle his father’s aides on the golf course. “He lost his amateur status with all the money I lost to him,” said Anthony Carbonetti, the former City Hall chief of staff.
But life as an unwitting public figure could also be brutal.
In 2000, the mayor’s marriage to Andrew’s mother, Donna Hanover, ruptured in open view, to the delight of the city tabloids. A teenage Andrew sought refuge in an unlikely place.
“The president was very good to him when Andrew’s parents got divorced,” Mr. Carbonetti said of Mr. Trump. “Andrew kind of took to the golf course to clear his head a lot, and one of the places he went was Mar-a-Lago.” (Mr. Giuliani said he spent even more time with Mr. Trump at courses in Westchester, New Jersey and West Palm Beach, Fla.)
Monica Crowley, a Giuliani family friend who is now an ambassador and chief of protocol for Mr. Trump, described the dynamic between the president and Mr. Giuliani as “almost like a paternal relationship.” It helped that they shared a love language: their favorite sport.
“The president likes him as a golfer,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, the conservative outlet, “respects him as a golfer.”
People who know both families credit the president with helping to mend the relationship between father and son, which had grown so frayed that Andrew Giuliani spoke publicly during Rudolph Giuliani’s 2008 presidential run about their estrangement.
By then, the younger Mr. Giuliani had resolved to strike out on his own, plotting a career in competitive golf. When he was removed in 2008 from the Duke University golf team, Mr. Giuliani sued the school. (His coach had accused him of misdeeds that included breaking a club and chucking an apple at a peer.)
But like Donald Trump Jr., the MAGA-loyal son who as a young adult ventured west to live an outdoorsy life far removed from his complicated father, Andrew Giuliani would return to the family fold with the zeal of the reconverted. The Giulianis took up the shared cause of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Conceding that golf was perhaps best enjoyed recreationally, Andrew Giuliani joined the Trump White House with a broad sports focus in the Office of Public Liaison. The circumstances were atypical. Here was a staff member who might spend his weekend playing 18 holes with the president (alongside lawmakers and athlete-celebrities like Peyton Manning) before returning on Monday to his junior gig.
“Look, the president talks about it,” Mr. Giuliani said. “A lot of business gets done on the golf course.”
Former colleagues said Mr. Giuliani did not always wear his proximity to power lightly. In 2018, he had his West Wing access revoked for a time (along with a corresponding building badge) after trying to join an exclusive White House gathering that included the actor Sylvester Stallone, according to people with direct knowledge of the episode, and then berating staff members who intervened.
Those close to Andrew Giuliani, now a married father of a young daughter, say he has matured since his earliest White House days, eventually rising in the administration to help facilitate the return of sports leagues amid the Covid outbreak of 2020.
After Mr. Trump lost, Mr. Giuliani worked as a media personality on Newsmax before announcing a long-shot run for governor of New York. His 2022 campaign doubled as a referendum on the locally beleaguered family name: The elder Mr. Giuliani’s reputation and finances were collapsing amid his work for Mr. Trump and his legally actionable lies about the 2020 election.
“I advised Andrew at the time not to run,” Mr. Ruddy said, adding that if he did seek office, it should be elsewhere. “I said, ‘Your father has more supporters in Florida than he does in New York.’”
Neither was Mr. Trump thrilled at Mr. Giuliani’s bid, declining to endorse him in a Republican primary that included Lee Zeldin, who is now Mr. Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Mr. Giuliani lost by 20 points. But he showed an aptitude for retail politics, once stage-diving with fans of European soccer during a rowdy Brooklyn viewing party for an Italy-England match, according to Mr. Sliwa.
The campaign’s final days featured Mr. Giuliani’s most famous surrogate (the other Mr. Giuliani) and a familiar echo, when the candidate jumped up distractingly during an event as the former mayor began to speak.
“We have a tradition of me interrupting his speeches,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I haven’t matured at all.”
Mr. Giuliani passed his first test in the new job.
“Tell them,” Mr. Trump said last May, introducing his World Cup appointee (“a highly competitive golfer — I mean, really good”) and congratulating Mr. Giuliani’s father. “Is my golf game OK, too?”
He answered correctly.
“He knew what to say, see?” the president said, half-smiling. “He’s a smart person. That’s why I appointed him.”
Among host cities, the announcement was greeted with the assumptions that Democrats tend to make about someone who rejected the legitimacy of the 2020 election and showed up daily at a Manhattan courthouse to support Mr. Trump during his 2024 criminal trial.
Yet after a year in this role, Mr. Giuliani has coaxed broadly positive reviews from the same host cities on the grounds that seemed to earn him the job: He gets the president. He can get to the president. And for once, there is clear alignment on what Mr. Trump wants — a wildly successful global bonanza over the nation’s 250th birthday — and what Trump-averse cities want him to deliver.
“In government, handling the politics of the building is sometimes more important than your policy chops,” said Alex Lasry, the chief executive of the World Cup host committee for New York and New Jersey. “I will always take someone in government who has access and knows how to navigate the building.”
Last June, a social media post from U.S. Customs and Border Protection promised that the authorities would be “suited and booted” at the Club World Cup, a smaller tournament held before the World Cup. Mr. Lasry backchanneled with Mr. Giuliani to convey his concerns. He was told that homeland security officials would keep only a routine presence at the tournament, as they had for decades at similar events. The post was later deleted.
Last December, in a session with international media outlets, it was left to Mr. Giuliani to suggest that the president had a more unifying World Cup vision than they might suspect.
“Yesterday, the president called people from Somalia ‘garbage,’” an Al Jazeera journalist began. “You mentioned that the World Cup would be a global moment for unity.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Giuliani said, “I think the president has a unique style.”
In the interview with The Times, Mr. Giuliani said there was nobody “certainly in my lifetime, maybe in American history” better suited than Mr. Trump to host major events.
But some unexpected turns like the war in Iran, one of 48 countries in the tournament, have placed Mr. Giuliani in a precarious spot.
He joined fellow Trump supporters in cheering the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on X, adding, “We’ll deal with soccer games tomorrow.” The post, which no longer appears, did not go unnoticed inside FIFA, according to an employee who asked for anonymity to discuss internal matters. FIFA’s priority is generally dealing with soccer games today.
At times, Mr. Giuliani’s task force has seemed to operate as a kind of therapist-interpreter for those straining to decode Mr. Trump’s Washington — an “administration whisperer,” Mr. Lucas, the Kansas City mayor, said.
Mr. Giuliani was a valuable sounding board, organizers said, as cities agitated for their share of $625 million in congressional funding for tournament security.
“There were mayor murmurings: ‘Did you get your money yet?’” Mayor Andre Dickens of Atlanta said. “You’d pick up the phone and call Andrew, and he was confident: ‘Don’t worry. It’s going to happen.’”
The release of that money in March also hinted at the sometimes convoluted relationship between FIFA and Mr. Giuliani. Though Mr. Giuliani and his team assisted cities with grant applications for the homeland security funds, the shutdown-stalled grants began flowing only after a White House meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Infantino, FIFA’s president, which Mr. Giuliani joined.
While FIFA lobbied for the creation of the task force that Mr. Giuliani oversees, hoping to smooth federal access in the final planning stages, its leaders wince at any implication that he is now the man at the World Cup controls.
Mr. Infantino has independently forged a close relationship with Mr. Trump, presenting him with a newly invented FIFA Peace Prize after the president was denied a Nobel and smiling through Trump-favored musical acts like Andrea Bocelli and the Village People during the World Cup draw at the Kennedy Center last year. (“Probably a smart touch,” Mr. Giuliani said then of the entertainment.)
More recently, according to two people close to FIFA who also requested anonymity, officials there privately bristled at the social media video with Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Mullin, the homeland security secretary. Mr. Mullin said in the clip that Mr. Giuliani was “running FIFA.” Mr. Giuliani did not correct him. (In a statement, Carlos Cordeiro, FIFA’s senior adviser to the task force, trumpeted a “great working relationship” among all parties.)
Trump allies inside and outside government insist that Mr. Giuliani is an essential cog.
“A safe pair of hands,” said Steve Bannon, the far-right podcaster.
“An America First patriot,” said Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, adding that “only extremely talented individuals such as Andrew Giuliani” could meet the moment.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised him in a statement for instilling “a clear sense of direction” across the task force. Mr. Giuliani’s team has collaborated with the State Department to establish a fast-track visa program for ticket holders traveling to the United States.
Over the past year, Mr. Giuliani has also toured domestic host cities, toggling between weeds-y logistics and bond-building yuks. In Dallas, he learned about “heat mitigation” tactics and inspected a major broadcast center. In Philadelphia, he absorbed an emergency management briefing in a trailer outside the stadium over the din of Brazilian fans during the Club World Cup. In Kansas City, he showed off his swing at a novelty one-hole course modeled after Augusta National.
“This is a much more sustainable career than professional golf,” Mr. Giuliani said, according to Pam Kramer, the chief executive of the Kansas City host committee.
Speaking to The Times, Mr. Giuliani took an expansive view of his World Cup mission, noting that preparations might also inform ambitions for the 2028 Olympics and other events across what he envisions as an American “sports century.”
Friends predict that Mr. Giuliani might yet seek another political office — he rules nothing out — buttressed by what he expects to be a profile-raising success that would codify his status as a MAGA warrior in high standing.
Or.
“This is Trump’s showcase,” Mr. Sliwa said. “I would not want to be Andrew Giuliani if anything went wrong.”
Matt Flegenheimer is a correspondent for The Times focusing on in-depth profiles of powerful figures.
The post How Trump Entrusted His World Cup to Another Giuliani appeared first on New York Times.
