Trump Wins the FIFA Peace Prize (and Other Signs the Empire Has Lost the Plot)

Missile strikes on shipwrecked men, a press corps purged, Juneteenth stripped of free entry, Rachel Levine erased, and a president who may not know where he is.

Good morning! I’m writing from the land where reality is now indistinguishable from the cold open of an SNL sketch that got cut for being too dark. Pour yourself a large, merciful cup of coffee because today’s news comes pre-soaked in authoritarian absurdity, bureaucratic horror, and whatever unholy cocktail of ego and cognitive decline is powering the White House these days.

We begin, naturally, with President Donald J. Trump accepting the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, which is already the funniest sentence written in the English language this century. There he stood beside Gianni Infantino, a man who has never met a dictator he didn’t immediately try to high-five, as he was handed a certificate and medal like a kindergartener being named “Most Improved Listener.” Infantino crooned about Trump’s “extraordinary actions to advance peace and unity,” which is bold praise for a man whose foreign policy résumé reads like a heat map of global destabilization.

Then came Trump’s acceptance remarks, a flurry of invented peace deals, imaginary wars he claims to have stopped, and the usual unsolicited crowd-size updates. “We saved millions and millions of lives,” he declared, as if announcing a personal coupon code for world peace. He boasted that the U.S. is now “the hottest country anywhere in the world,” a line that would sound more plausible if he were unveiling a new line of microwavable burritos. He cited conflicts he supposedly ended “a little bit before they started,” including India and Pakistan, an achievement known to no one outside his frontal lobe. And he lavished praise on Infantino for “setting new records on ticket sales,” because even at his own peace prize ceremony, Trump cannot resist transforming global diplomacy into a merch table performance review. If delusion were a sport, Trump would finally deserve a FIFA award.

The real whiplash comes in the form of what Trump was doing just hours before he floated onto that stage to be anointed Soccer’s Ambassador of Eternal Serene Harmony: his administration was briefing Congress on video of a U.S. military aircraft vaporizing two shipwrecked men clinging to debris in the Caribbean last September. For all we know, these men were nothing more than fishermen, young, shirtless, exhausted, waving at an American aircraft in what any sane observer would interpret as a plea for rescue. Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, however, appears to have watched the same footage and detected a secret semaphore for an invisible cartel flotilla helpfully absent from every U.S. sensor in the hemisphere.

Bradley, confronted with the terribly inconvenient fact that the men were unarmed, half-dressed, and very clearly drowning, did what any bold military leader would do: he paused the live feed to ask a lawyer for the definition of “shipwreck.” Only in this administration could the law of war hinge on a dictionary consultation while two human beings cling to a piece of fiberglass the size of a dinner table. Having decided that the protections owed to shipwrecked persons did not apply to persons who were, in fact, shipwrecked, Bradley ordered a second strike. Then he marched into Congress to explain, with the confidence of a man who’s practiced this in the mirror, that the bow fragment might have contained submerged cocaine, though none was visible, none confirmed, and none of the lawmakers saw anything except two terrified men about to be erased. Why let the absence of evidence interfere with the opportunity to demonstrate “strength”?

This is where the speculation turns darker. Rescuing those men would have meant returning with witnesses, witnesses who could contradict the invented narrative, who could look into a camera and say, “We were just a taxi service carrying day laborers.” Whether or not that motivated the decision, the outcome is indistinguishable from a cover-up executed by missile.

If you’re wondering how this looks on the international stage, picture it: Trump accepting what is essentially his surrogate Nobel Peace Prize, a made-to-order FIFA bauble crafted for a man who has spent a decade begging Oslo for validation, and who has never quite recovered from the psychic wound of watching Barack Obama win the real one. Trump cannot be bested by a Black man, certainly not on the world stage, so here he is clutching his consolation trophy while two men are blown apart in the water by U.S. missiles because the administration has reclassified drug trafficking as an “armed conflict.” We are watching authoritarian slipstream in real time: the violence always happens off-stage so the leader can be filmed basking in applause on cue. The peace medal glitters under the lights, the audience claps politely, and somewhere far out in the Caribbean, the ocean rolls over the evidence.

European news outlets are openly mocking the whole affair, treating Trump’s FIFA peace prize as the diplomatic equivalent of a participation ribbon handed to a child who didn’t make the team. The UK papers have already dubbed it “the Nobel for people who don’t read,” the French press is wondering aloud whether Infantino slipped on a banana peel before announcing it, and German commentators have settled on the only logical explanation: this is what happens when a man who cannot stand being outshone by Barack Obama decides to manufacture his own peace prize.

The Pentagon, already under Pete Hegseth’s enthusiastic program of journalist expulsion, held a press conference with its new, loyalty-tested “approved media,” and the resulting tableau looked like a parody of state propaganda performed by the world’s saddest improv troupe. The room was nearly empty, save for a TikTok kid, an OANN microphone, Matt Gaetz wearing his “I’m a journalist today” face, and Laura Loomer standing there as proof that the Pentagon now maintains a curated guest list that could double as a CPAC afterparty roster. Every serious reporter had walked out weeks earlier rather than sign Hegseth’s new 21-page loyalty oath disguised as a press credential agreement, a document so sweeping it bans journalists from requesting “nonpublic information,” which is a delicate bureaucratic phrase for “reporting.” The New York Times promptly sued on First Amendment grounds, accusing the Pentagon of engineering a system of prior restraint so blatant it manages to violate both press-freedom doctrine and common decency.

Should you worry that any of this might slow the administration down, fear not: Trump unveiled a National Security Strategy this week that formally replaces America’s commitment to democracy with a new policy of “cash over conscience.” Gone is the pretense that the U.S. stands for freedom or human rights; in its place is a glossy PowerPoint version of the Monroe Doctrine for the age of strongmen, minerals, and sole-source contracts. Europe, according to the strategy, is in the final stages of “civilizational erasure,” and the United States will now “cultivate resistance” to democratically elected leaders who annoy the White House. Israel and Taiwan, once heralded as democratic allies, are now evaluated strictly in terms of shipping lanes and semiconductor yields, the foreign policy equivalent of checking the resale value on a used Honda.

What makes all of this so uncanny is not just the content but the mood. Something in the atmosphere has shifted. Legacy media outlets that spent nine years tying themselves in knots to avoid describing Trump as an authoritarian have suddenly begun calling his worldview what it is. In its NSS analysis, The New York Times flatly noted that Trump’s new strategy “describes a world in which American interests are far narrower” and replaces the familiar U.S. image as “a global force for freedom” with a nation that sees authoritarian regimes primarily as “sources of cash.” That isn’t hedging; that’s the Times looking directly at the camera and telling the public: this is authoritarianism. And if that weren’t enough, the Times followed up by suing the Pentagon for constitutional violations, accusing the Defense Department of rules that “target the exercise of First Amendment rights” and “seek to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done.” The spell is breaking.

This is why the emerging medical speculation matters, not as gossip, and not as armchair diagnosis, but because it raises a question that now feels inescapable: Is Donald Trump mentally or physically fit enough to hold the power he currently wields? When a president displays bruising consistent with twice-monthly infusion therapy, when neurologists observing from afar note that his cognitive slips resemble patterns associated with Alzheimer’s treatments and ARIA episodes, when the White House refuses to explain why the commander-in-chief appears increasingly disoriented on camera, it becomes impossible to separate his private medical condition from the public dangers of his office.

The presidency is not ceremonial; it is the job of making life-and-death decisions. And this is the very administration that has authorized the bombing of shipwrecked men in the Caribbean, men who may have been fishermen, fuel supply couriers, or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, based on a legal theory pulled from the ether and a commander who cannot consistently complete a sentence on live television. Discussing Trump’s cognitive state isn’t voyeurism; it is the recognition that the man who orders missile strikes may no longer be capable of understanding them.

We are entrusting the most powerful military on earth to someone whose decline is visible, accelerating, and increasingly impossible for even his own staff to disguise. If Trump is receiving biweekly Alzheimer’s infusions, as patterns of bruising and behavior strongly suggest to medical observers, then the American public is not merely entitled to know; it is being placed at risk by not knowing. Trump’s cognitive decline is evidenced on tape. The question now is whether a declining man is being propped up and used by an authoritarian apparatus willing to kill in his name.

And while we’re on the subject of theatrical distractions, remember the National Park Service’s suddenly generous free-entry policy, rolled out with all the finesse of a clearance sale in a collapsing mall. The administration trumpeted new “free days” at America’s parks not because public lands are thriving (they aren’t) or because visitation is booming (it isn’t), but because Trump needed a feel-good headline that didn’t involve missile strikes, lawsuits, or visibly concerning neurological pauses. The NPS free-entry gambit was never about stewardship; it was about optics, the political equivalent of tossing a couple of peppermint candies into an active volcano.

Of course, in true MAGA fashion, the list of “free days” has been meticulously curated to reflect the regime’s worldview: Juneteenth and MLK Day, the two federal holidays explicitly rooted in Black freedom and civil rights, have been stripped of free-entry status, while “patriotic” days like Flag Day, Veterans Day, and, yes, Donald Trump’s own birthday, have been elevated to free-admission events. It is neither subtle, nor accidental. It is the National Park Service being weaponized as a cultural message board announcing, in effect, which Americans count and which do not.

It’s the same pattern everywhere: public land as propaganda canvas, history as a mood board for white grievance, federal agencies forced into the role of ideological stagehands. Think the newly crowned Donald J Trump Institute of Peace.

Even that would be merely pathetic if it weren’t part of a broader pattern: a government performing benevolence with one hand while the other busying itself with cruelty and erasure. Which brings us to the Department of Health and Human Services, where the commitment to authoritarian aesthetics now includes literally rewriting the identities of the people who served this country. Admiral Rachel Levine, the first openly transgender person ever confirmed by the Senate, has quietly had her official portrait altered at HHS headquarters. Walk down the seventh-floor hallway of the Humphrey Building, and her portrait is still there. But the nameplate beneath it has been stripped of her actual name and replaced with the one she no longer uses. NPR confirmed the alteration. An ideological incision, a petty act of bureaucratic violence meant to signal exactly who counts and who does not in Trump’s America.

The NPS free-entry announcement and the HHS portrait vandalism may seem like footnotes, but they reveal the same impulse: a regime trying to fabricate a world that flatters the leader’s ego while erasing anything that contradicts it. Parks become free not because the public deserves them, but because Trump needs applause. Portraits are rewritten not because history changed, but because identity itself is now a negotiable inconvenience. And all the while, the man ostensibly in charge stumbles through speeches, displays bruises consistent with biweekly infusion therapy, and freezes on camera like a buffering livestream.

Take a deep breath and a deeper sip. The contradictions are becoming impossible to ignore, and the tide is turning faster than anyone expected. And as always, we’re here to chronicle every surreal, infuriating, occasionally darkly comic moment of it.