The “peace president” accepted a very special honor last week. Having been denied the Nobel Peace Prize he so desperately covets, Donald Trump was awarded the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, which was invented only last month by global soccer czar Gianni Infantino. The prize is a large trophy accompanied by a medal that made Trump so excited he snatched it from the box like a furtive five-year-old with a box of chocolates and put it on himself. Infantino, who is president of FIFA and one of the newer members of Trump’s admiring entourage (for some reason, he showed up a few weeks ago at a ceremony for the Gaza peace process), showered Trump with meaningless praise, saying, “You definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action, for what you have obtained — in your way — but you obtained it in an incredible way…”
He did not elaborate on exactly what actions he had in mind, but before the ceremony Trump had to pretend that he didn’t know he was receiving the prize and was asked whether that might conflict with a possible military strike against Venezuela. He replied that he had settled eight wars and that a ninth was coming, “which nobody’s ever done before.” He added, “I really want to save lives, I don’t need prizes, I need to save lives and I’ve saved millions and millions of lives and that’s really what I want to do.” He didn’t mention the killings in missile strikes on Caribbean fishing boats. Presumably, those lives aren’t among the “millions” he says he’s saved.
The optics of this silly flattery by FIFA, juxtaposed with the burgeoning Pentagon scandal, in which it appears that Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are overseeing a policy of repeated war crimes against people in small boats thousands of miles from U.S. shores, was stark. Members of Congress emerged from a briefing with the Navy admiral in charge of the Sept. 2 strike, in which two survivors were summarily executed as they floated on broken pieces of a small speedboat. Legislators looked ashen and somber, and one of their number, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., declared it “one of the most troubling things” he’d ever witnessed.
Some Republicans, however, such as Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, seemed highly aroused by these same images, reveling in the gruesome deaths of what seemed to be low-level local operators, probably paid a few hundred dollars to take their cargo from Venezuela to a Caribbean island, whence it may be shipped to Europe. Hegseth himself gave a fiery speech in California the next day, promising that the U.S. intended to continue the killing and telling the audience:
These narcoterrorists are the al-Qaida of our hemisphere, and we are hunting them with the same sophistication and precision that we hunted al-Qaida. We are tracking them, we are killing them, and we will keep killing them so long as they are poisoning our people with narcotics so lethal that they’re tantamount to chemical weapons.
It’s estimated that 42 million Americans have used cocaine, the drug that is most likely being trafficked to Europe from Venezuela. (If that many people have ingested chemical weapons, we have bigger problems.) Fentanyl, which is a genuinely deadly drug, is almost all trafficked over the southern border — and usually imported by Americans. Will Team Trump be executing those “narcoterrorists” too? Cotton says no, but there’s no logical reason why they should stop, given their current rationale.
As the president performed his “Trump dance” and the Village People delievered “YMCA” at the FIFA prize event, the U.S. military struck another boat, killing four more people. The strange dissonance became even more jarring when the administration finally released its long-awaited “National Security Strategy.” Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir makes short work of that embarrassing document:
It’s a long-term, deep-horizon manifesto for the reactionary-revolutionary Red Caesar regime dreamed of by [Stephen] Miller, [JD] Vance and the bro-genius billionaires. It imagines unilateral U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere — the Monroe Doctrine, but with drones and AI — a Crusader-style reconquest of secular Europe by the white right, and a chummy division of the rest of the world into old-school spheres of influence, involving Russia, China, the Saudi monarchy and whoever else gets invited.
Meanwhile, here at home, Trump continues his war against all immigrants. He is now engaging in rank racism, calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and threatening to revoke the citizenship of anyone he finds distasteful, which by pure coincidence seems to mean all people of color. He is banning half the world’s population from entering the U.S. and virtually ending the asylum process for everyone except white South Africans. The sight of masked, armed secret police in unmarked vehicles brutally assaulting anyone they choose on streets all across America is straight out of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania. The language he uses is hostile, cruel, vulgar and degrading.
Now consider the absurdity of Trump’s insistence that he’s a prince of peace and just cares about “saving lives, millions of lives.” He actually said, “As president, my highest aspiration is to bring peace and stability to the world.” Sycophants are knocking each other over to give him prizes and kiss his ring, telling him exactly what he wants to hear. But the bigger question is whether anyone’s actually buying it?
This inconsistency has always been present in the MAGA coalition but until recently it hasn’t been quite as obvious. It’s not clear that his base is happy about it. Trump has always sold himself as a strongman, and his bizarre phony machismo has had inexplicable appeal for his followers. Now he’s falling asleep in public, spending most of his time redecorating and partying, and otherwise looking weaker every day. His paeans to peace strike a discordant note with the people who love him best for his nasty, smart-ass cracks and strong-arm tactics. Meanwhile the minority of old-style Republicans who would love for him to stop acting like a nasty schoolyard bully aren’t happy either, since they still hope he may behave like a serious president.
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There hasn’t been any specific polling on this weird MAGA-world contradiction. But if you believe the overall numbers, Trump is now unpopular with a majority across all issues, even those that have traditionally been his strength. His approval ratings are now in the high 30s and low 40s. Independents are abandoning him in droves.
Mind you, the hardcore base is sticking with Trump so far because, like their idol, they can never admit they were wrong. But even they are starting to feel the dissonance of hearing this feeble, elderly man yammering about peace amid daily news footage of grotesque attacks on immigrants, boat strikes and increasingly bellicose warmongering. Some who took him seriously about America First isolationism are ready to abandon ship.
Whether this ends up truly splitting the Republican base remains to be seen. But this fault line in the coalition is widening by the day. No wonder so many GOP members of Congress are retiring next year. Who wants to stay around for the ugly implosion that’s just about to happen?
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on Trump’s not-so-slow collapse
