WASHINGTON D.C. – The air in this town is always thick with the ghosts of bad ideas, a terminal humidity of ambition and decay that clings to your clothes like cheap cologne. But tonight, inside the Kennedy Center, the vibe is pure, uncut, late-stage delirium. It’s electric. They’re giving Donald Trump a peace prize. For soccer.
Let that sink in. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association, a self-governing body of such profound and legendary corruption that it makes the Vatican look like a credit union, has manifested a new trophy out of thin air. It’s a big, gold-plated objet d’art featuring hands cradling the globe, the kind of thing a Bond villain would keep on his desk. And they’ve given the inaugural one to a man whose presidency was less about global harmony and more about a rolling, four-year tribal warfare reenactment.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino, a man with the slick, oily sheen of a perpetually nervous seal, is on stage, beaming. “This is your prize, this is your peace prize,” he tells Trump, draping a medal around his neck. He says it’s for Trump’s “exceptional and extraordinary actions to promote peace and unity around the world.” The teleprompter words hang there in the refrigerated air, magnificent and meaningless. A perfect vibe check for a doomed republic.
Trump, for his part, accepts the honor with the practiced humility of a man who has long craved this kind of validation and was finally gifted it by the one international body more brazenly transactional than his own real estate empire. “The world is a safer place now,” he declares to the assembled dignitaries and sporting officials. He claims to have saved millions of lives, casually mentioning the Congo, India, and Pakistan as conflicts he single-handedly averted just before they kicked off. It’s a savage performance, a masterclass in saying the quiet part loud to a room full of people paid not to notice.
FIFA’s ‘Peace’ Prize: Trump’s New Trophy for Global Delirium
And as I’m watching this glorious theater of the absurd, my phone buzzes with the real news, the B-side to this hit single of American madness. It’s a story about Trump’s man at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth, a sentient jawline with a warrior-poet complex, is currently being investigated by Congress. The allegation is that during a September strike on a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean, after an initial missile blast left survivors in the water, a verbal order came down the chain: “kill everybody.” It’s what the professionals call a “double tap,” a phrase with the cold, sterile finality of a coroner’s report. It is also, for those keeping score at home, a potential war crime.
Hegseth, naturally, denies it. And the President, back from collecting his soccer trophy, believes him. “Pete said he did not order the death of those two men,” Trump said. “And I believe him.”
Pentagon Double-Tap: Defense Secretary Hegseth’s War Crime Allegations
The beauty of it all, the sheer, beautiful absurdity, is that we don’t even need anonymous sources to get a glimpse into Hegseth’s thinking. The man wrote it all down. In his book, ‘The War on Warriors’, he proudly recounts telling his platoon in Iraq to flat-out ignore the advice of military lawyers—the so-called ‘jagoffs’—on the rules of engagement. He describes a briefing where a JAG officer explains you can’t just light up a guy holding an RPG; you have to wait until he points it at you with intent.
Hegseth’s response, then and now, is a primal scream against restraint. “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves,” he writes, “aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?!”
There it is. The whole game, right there in print. Forget the laws of war, forget the Geneva Conventions, forget the entire project of pretending we’re better than the feral chaos we claim to be fighting. Just win. Kill everybody. It’s not a bug; it’s the core programming.
Hegseth’s Manual for Mayhem: Why ‘Jagoffs’ & Rules of Engagement Don’t Matter
So here we are, adrift in the savage currents of the 21st century. The President is on a stage in Washington, accepting a peace prize from the globe’s most notorious sporting syndicate for wars he didn’t finish, and peace he didn’t broker. Meanwhile, his Secretary of Defense is under a microscope for allegedly ordering the execution of wounded combatants, a philosophy he quite literally wrote a book about.
The Grand Illusion: When Peace Is War and Rules Are for Suckers
This isn’t hypocrisy. That word is too small, too quaint for the moment we’re in. This is a full-blown systems failure of meaning. It’s terminal brain rot, broadcast live. Peace is war. Winning is everything. And rules are for the other guys. The spectacle at the Kennedy Center isn’t a celebration; it’s a distraction, a bright, shiny object to dangle while the real machinery of the empire grinds on, chewing up bodies in the dark water.
They’re playing a game, all of them. A high-stakes bet where the house always wins and the chips are human lives. And tonight, they handed out a trophy for it. I look at the golden globe in the President’s hands, and all I can see is the reflection of a burning boat, somewhere out on the endless, indifferent sea. Jesus Christ.
For more of Trump’s ceremonial madness check this one about the fish sandwich king.
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