By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
There are billions of soccer fans around the world who live and breathe the sport, but none are as big of a deal in 2026 as Freddy.
Posting diligently during his journey across Mexico and the U.S. to watch the games, the random German soccer fan’s innocent all-caps revelations about the extravagant parts of America we often scoff at has captured the world’s attention — also reviving patriotic sentiments during this complicated time in our history.
Freddy dove headfirst into American culture on his trip. He called Taco Bell “the holy land,” and referred to his Waffle House experience at 1 a.m. as a “10/10.” He visited a Buc-ee’s after midnight and couldn’t believe it was a gas station. Most of his posts contained a child-like wonder at the surreal American scene.
Now, with more than 700,000 followers on X, Freddy’s lighthearted approach to everything American has led to an outpouring of love — along with a healthy amount of skepticism and complicated feelings.
He’s been given everything from gift baskets and free food to baseball tickets and stadium tours. “Welcome Freddy” banners were seen hanging at some state border signs. Airlines literally bid against one another to give him a free seat on their jets after he missed a flight that might’ve cost him the opportunity to see Germany’s games.
Everyone seems to want to give Freddy all the free stuff they can.
Freddy even received an invitation to tour the White House by Ambassador Nick Adams, a Trump-supporting internet troll and shit-poster who was named by the president as Special Presidential Envoy for America, Tourism, Exceptionalism and Values. (If that title didn’t make you throw up in your mouth, take a stroll through Adams’ social media history.)
“I think it’s really important that we recognize people that truly love and appreciate our country that are not Americans,” Adams said. “Americans are the most hospitable people …”
Uhhh, what’s that now? “Hospitable” you say? After years of deportations, xenophobia and the slow creep toward an authoritarian neo-feudal dystopia, the Trump administration now celebrates a German tourist because they visited a giant gas station and a Taco Bell?
Maybe it’s the fact that international tourism to the U.S. has declined 14% in a single year that has Trump’s toadies jumping on the Freddy bandwagon. The freefall has cost the U.S. economy a reported $29 billion in 2025 alone — all because non-Americans saw what was happening on the news and chose to stay away. (And Germans should by rights be most alarmed at our nationalist trajectory.)
The optics of applauding free food and services given to a tourist while also cutting SNAP benefits to millions of American taxpayers leaves a sour taste in the mouth that even ranch dressing can’t cover. The plain truth is that the America we live in is way more complicated than Freddy saw on his trip.
I remember traveling through Vietnam and eating a bowl of pho the size of a basketball that cost 75 cents. I was enamored and amazed, but I also didn’t allow that bowl of soup to distract me from some of the other troubling aspects of the country, like entire bays filled with discarded styrofoam noodle cups, thick air pollution and a communist government that treated — and still treats — one-half of its population with downright cruelty after the Vietnam War.
My feelings about Freddy are equally as complicated, because what started as an innocent soccer fan enamored with another country has now led to corporations and bigwigs latching onto him as if to say, “See? Don’t believe the fake news — America is awesome. Just look at this guy who loves Buc-ee’s.”
And you better believe that I also identify with Freddy. America is awesome in all the amazing and terrible ways indicated by that description. As Hunter S. Thompson told a BBC film crew in 1978, “One of things I have to appreciate about America — and if I didn’t I’d either be stupid or insane — is that, for good or ill, I can function here. And I don’t think there are many societies, or social-political systems, where I could function the way I am now. And perhaps a lot of people would think that’s much better — that’s the best argument for destroying the system: It gets rid of people like me.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Meanwhile, however, our president continues to use the White House to enrich himself and his family off the backs of taxpayers. More than 73,000 people are being held in ICE detention facilities around the country (bear in mind that there were about 24,000 people detained in German concentration camps in 1939), Trump’s biggest supporters still regularly tell anyone who isn’t white to “go back where you came from,” and rising prices just keep rising thanks to unprovoked wars and unforced errors. But don’t pay any attention to that, let’s celebrate fast food and consumerism.
Freddy’s trip through America might have started as an innocent voyage through the “American Dream,” but in reality, he’s traveling straight into the heart of darkness.
