Once upon a time in America, an aging, criminal President—who once partied with a notorious pedophile—decided to give himself a fictional prize to satiate his bruised ego over not winning the Nobel Peace Prize he so desperately desired, despite bombing several countries and launching a disastrous trade war.
Before the new year, Donald Trump attempted—and failed—to broker a peace deal to end Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians. For his pathetic efforts, Trump’s dutiful MAGA reeks unleashed a campaign to whine, beg, and pressure the global community into recognizing their king with a Nobel Peace Prize, which instead was awarded to Venezuelan pro-democracy activist María Corina Machado.
Undeterred, Trump leaned on a notoriously corrupt FIFA committee to award him the first-ever, entirely legitimate, and not at all fabricated “FIFA Peace Prize” in early December. A week later, Trump’s Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors to halt an ongoing bribery case involving FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.
“These prosecutions are not consistent with the current prosecutorial priorities of the United States, which direct the Department of Justice’s resources into Making America Safe Again,” a spokesperson for the Justice Department said at the time.
Those “priorities” apparently entailed engaging in a massive cover-up of the Epstein scandal, as Justice Department officials continue to delay releasing files related to the case, as ordered by Congress. (Trump, of course, was once described as one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friends.) They also included ignoring white supremacist terrorists, the number one domestic terror threat in the country, and instead focusing on antifa and Somali communities in the United States, the latter of which Trump referred to as “garbage” people who come from “shithole countries.” But that was so 2025.
A brand new year presented fresh opportunities to manufacture new enemies to distract from Trump’s disastrous economic policies that solely benefit the billionaires who received a permanent tax cut, prompting the largest wealth transfer in U.S. history. Then, in order to plunder Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, Trump and the GOP abandoned their façade of “America First” noninterventionism and invaded the South American country, kidnapping its dictator president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, in the process. Apparently, Trump couldn’t be bothered to inform members of the U.S. Congress or receive their approval for this illegal operation, but he did find time to inform the oil companies, both before and after the U.S. military strike.
In a bold strategy to make friends and gain allies, he also decided to threaten Mexico—a co-host along with the United States of FIFA World Cup 2026—as well as Colombia and Cuba. And he warned that his administration was exploring military “options” to capture Greenland, even though such a reckless act would trigger NATO’s Article 5, potentially prompt a world war, and further isolate and weaken America’s beleaguered standing on the global stage. Another World Cup 2026 host country, Canada, was not spared, either, as Trump had previously threatened to transform the northern ally into America’s fifty-first state.
Meanwhile, FIFA’s governing body refused to condemn Trump’s invasion of Venezuela or his bellicose rhetoric against numerous countries that were set to participate in the upcoming tournament. Apparently, its members were fine with Trump “running” Venezuela, selling its oil at “market price,” and controlling the money “to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States.”
This was all part and parcel of a newly unveiled “Donroe Doctrine” articulated by faux-Goebbels Stephen Miller to CNN host Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” (Blowback is something that has also been around since the United States started meddling in Latin America more than a century ago, but Miller perhaps never got around to reading those chapters in his history books.)
Perhaps FIFA’s governing body assumed that the forty-eight countries participating in this year’s World Cup were fellow masochists and enjoyed being humiliated and belittled. Unfortunately, not everyone shared the same kink. Tourism to the United States had already dropped as a result of Trump and Miller’s white nationalist policies, which include unleashing armed, masked ICE agents to terrorize Black and brown communities in blue cities and murder unarmed, white moms like thirty-seven-year-old Renée Nicole Macklin Good. Their wide net also captured and punished white immigrants, such as Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney, who alleged that she was placed in chains and held by ICE for twelve days after her visa application paperwork was flagged by immigration officers. And let’s not forget that Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, had been kidnapped and detained for weeks in 2025 simply for writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed in the school newspaper. And a French scientist attempting to attend a conference in the United States was denied entry in March 2025, after immigration officers found messages on his phone that were critical of the administration.
What better way to invite the international community, along with thousands of soccer fans, to spend money in the United States while celebrating FIFA’s World Cup than by aggressively punishing and traumatizing students, immigrants of color, workers, tourists, and scientists? Promoting white supremacist talking points of “remigration,” which means ethnic cleansing, trying to end birthright citizenship, and threatening to denaturalize brown and Black citizens is definitely a creative strategy to “Make America Great Again” and entice global soccer fans to travel to the United States. Perhaps the Trump Administration wants only white soccer players and tourists from South Africa to visit, considering the regime openly boasts about restricting immigration to include only “white refugees.” (Exceptions, of course, will be made for players of color who openly praise Trump, pledge fealty to MAGA, and give him shiny, expensive medals and toys.)
At the very least, maybe it’s time for FIFA to rescind its first-ever “peace prize” until Trump, Miller, and their fellow gang of white nationalists figure out if they truly want a majority of World Cup participating countries and their fans to visit the United States of America without a fear of being kidnapped, tortured, and harassed.