Peace, War, Gerrymanders, and a Ballroom Fit for Caligula

The U.S. is hauled before a human-rights tribunal while Trump expands his power, his palace, and his delusions, now with FIFA glitter.

Good morning! Trump may be on a “light schedule” today, but the rest of the world is decidedly not, and the president’s governing style, part violence, part delusion, part televised self-worship, and part construction project gone mad, is once again leaving scorch marks across several continents. We begin with the news that a Colombian family has filed the first known international human rights complaint against the United States for the boat strikes Trump loves to brag about on Truth Social. Their case centers on Alejandro Carranza, a fisherman whose engine failed and whose boat was signaling distress when a U.S. missile vaporized it on September 15, shortly before Trump declared the dead to be “narco-terrorists.” Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, describes Carranza as a lifelong fisherman who may have accepted occasional transport work out of poverty but whose actions “never deserved the death penalty.” With a clarity that seems permanently beyond Washington’s reach, Carranza’s widow and children are now asking the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to treat the strike as what it was: an extrajudicial killing.

The complaint names Pete Hegseth, the “more lethality, fewer lawyers” Secretary of Defense, as the official who ordered the strike, and it names Donald Trump as the man who “ratified” it. The IACHR, which had already warned the U.S. that its overseas operations must respect “the right to life” and “due process,” now has a concrete case in hand. After nearly a century of American foreign policy, it took the Trump administration less than four months to produce an alleged war crime so straightforward that a fisherman’s family can point directly to the Pentagon’s own manual as Exhibit A.

Congress has produced its first domestic response. Representative Shri Thanedar has introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth, accusing him of murder, conspiracy to murder, and leaking classified war plans into a Signal chat like a teenager running a gaming guild. No one expects the Republican House to impeach the avatar of their lethality cosplay, but the filing is historic. Hegseth is now the first Secretary of Defense, (or “War” as he prefers), in U.S. history to face impeachment articles explicitly alleging murder. Trump will cry “fake,” but the constitutional record has already been updated: the Cabinet stands accused of killing civilians at sea, then insisting it was lawful.

And just as the executive branch tests the limits of killing power abroad, the judiciary is clearing space for a quieter suffocation at home. The Supreme Court blessed Texas’s mid-decade gerrymander, an off-year, “because we can” redraw explicitly designed to eliminate Democratic districts before voters have the chance. Election lawyers are calling it the most dangerous opinion since Shelby County. The Court essentially told every Republican-led state it is free to redraw maps whenever it likes, for whatever partisan purpose it likes, until the very notion of competitive elections is safely stuffed, mounted, and hung over the fireplace. With Trump’s allies in Texas already prepping their next redraw, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and the Carolinas are eagerly lining up. The banner over American democracy now reads: Thanks for playing, but the map has been retired.

If you needed further proof that the Trump administration operates on two parallel planes, one where it kills people, and another where it congratulates itself for saving them, look no further than the Washington Peace Accord extravaganza held yesterday at the Trump-branded Institute of Peace. Trump gathered the leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to announce he had personally ended a 30-year conflict that withstood every previous attempt at mediation. According to Trump, this wasn’t merely a peace deal; it was the eighth war he has ended in less than a year, a statistic that exists solely inside his imagination.

The staging was immaculate: African heads of state seated beneath chandeliers, Trump glowing like a man posing for his own portrait, and a procession of dignitaries from Angola to Qatar introduced as though they were contestants on a midday talk show. Trump basked in the moment, hinting that the building’s plaque may or may not already bear his name. He declared it “a great day for Africa” and “a great day for the world,” though his real excitement was reserved for the idea that Rwanda and the DRC would now spend their time “hugging, holding hands, and taking advantage of the United States economically like every other country does.” Peace, Trump-style: affection plus extractive opportunity.

The so-called Washington Agreements include commitments to a ceasefire, demobilization, and the return of displaced people. Noble goals, marred by the inconvenient fact that fighting between Congolese forces and Rwanda-backed M23/AFC rebels has continued throughout the week, with rebels still entrenched near Goma and along key mining corridors. Congolese and Rwandan leaders gave earnest speeches about turning the page on suffering, but none of the ceremony altered the underlying reality: the conflict’s causes remain unresolved, and neither government’s behavior changed en route to Washington.

What became clear, somewhat accidentally, thanks to Trump’s inability to keep quiet, is that this “peace” deal doubles as a minerals deal. Trump could barely contain himself: American companies will be heading into the Great Lakes region to “take out some of the rare earth” and “everybody’s going to make a lot of money.” The applause lines about ending atrocities were immediately followed by an almost childlike enthusiasm for cobalt, coltan, and copper, the kinds of minerals that electrify Washington lobbyists faster than any ceasefire ever could.

Regional leaders were polite enough to play along, though the strain showed. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame praised Trump’s “evenhanded” leadership, a description so misaligned with observable reality that one half-expected the chandeliers to fall out of the ceiling. Then came Félix Tshisekedi, president of the DRC, whose name Trump mangled with the gusto of a man attacking a dessert he cannot pronounce. Tshisekedi spoke poignantly about turning the page on decades of displacement, his sincerity contrasting sharply with Trump’s fixation on resource extraction.

Even within the gold-trimmed mirage, the cracks were visible. Leaders gently reminded Trump that peace now depends entirely on Rwanda and the DRC actually withdrawing troops, ceasing support for proxy militias, and honoring commitments neither has historically treated as more than a suggestion. Then came the question no one expected to be asked in Trump’s presence: when, exactly, would Rwanda withdraw its forces from eastern Congo? Trump, hovering three feet above the stage on pure self-regard, answered with the breezy imperial confidence of a man who believes timelines are aspirational and miracles are always “coming very quickly.” The applause was polite, the skepticism was not.

The entire spectacle illustrated the central contradiction of Trump’s foreign policy: maximum violence where the U.S. faces no resistance, maximum theatrics where cameras are present, and maximum extraction wherever minerals glitter beneath the soil. The Rwanda-Congo accord may be a milestone, or it may be the latest Washington ritual in which peace is declared, fighting continues, and mining concessions quietly change hands. Trump sees himself as the Prince of Peace in a building named for peace, but the deal he engineered is less Oslo Accords and more Oslo with a side of lithium futures.

One can almost imagine future historians pairing the boat strikes and the peace accord as two sides of the same coin. In one hemisphere, Trump orders lethal force against impoverished fishermen and insists it was a lawful military operation. In the other, he gathers African leaders beneath a marble rotunda and insists he alone ended a war that tormented millions. The continuity is not moral but psychological: Trump wants to be both the man who kills with impunity and the man who heals with ceremony, and as long as the cameras flash and the donors sign their checks, he sees no contradiction at all.

In the midst of this, the alleged war crimes, the international complaints, the impeachment filings, the judicial greenlights for minority rule, Trump will spend the afternoon at the Kennedy Center, where FIFA will draw the 2026 World Cup groups in a glitzy two-hour ceremony featuring Kevin Hart, Heidi Klum, Andrea Bocelli, and a cast of sports legends. Gianni Infantino will emcee, though Trump is widely expected to insert himself into the proceedings. That this spectacle unfolds in a building Trump once attempted to rename after himself merely completes the visual metaphor: global pageantry functioning as domestic anesthetic.

If you’re looking for the week’s most unintentionally perfect symbol of Trump’s second term, it arrived in the form of one very large, very unnecessary building: Trump has fired the architect of his $300 million White House ballroom after the two clashed over its size. James McCrery II, a cathedral builder, reportedly committed the unforgivable act of reminding Trump that physical structures have limits. Trump responded by expanding the ballroom to 90,000 square feet, larger than the entire White House residence, and demolishing the East Wing, which he had previously promised would remain untouched. The structure will be financed in part by Amazon and Google, because nothing captures the soul of America quite like Big Tech underwriting the president’s personal gala hall. A crane now rises over the South Lawn, preparing the most dramatic physical alteration of the White House since the Truman renovation, all so Trump can have a party space big enough to house his ego in foul weather.

It would be easy to treat the ballroom saga as comic relief, a bit of architectural slapstick amid a bleak geopolitical news cycle. But it is not an outlier, it is the blueprint. Everything in Trump’s second term works this way: bulldoze what is historic, inflate what is unnecessary, fire anyone who says no, and declare the resulting chaos a sign of visionary greatness. Fishermen are terrorists. Peace is a mining contract waiting to happen. Democracy is a map to be redrawn until it submits. And the East Wing is a small price to pay for a ballroom fit for a minor emperor.

And so the day begins: the United States is being hauled before an international human rights tribunal for the killing of civilians; the Secretary of Defense is facing impeachment for murder; the Supreme Court has transformed partisan gerrymandering into a perpetual-motion machine; and Trump is off to a celebrity-studded FIFA draw before checking in on the progress of his donor-funded palace. It is, at heart, one story, a government that has replaced law with impulse, process with spectacle, and governance with the architecture of its own self-regard.