IN AWARDING US president Donald J Trump the first Fifa Peace Prize, Fifa president Gianni Infantino introduced Trump as “a leader that cares about the people.” Yes, he actually said that.

The prize was awarded last Friday with relatively little fanfare and a brief and vacuous acceptance speech by Trump during the draw for the 2026 Men’s World Cup, held at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC.

The prize was given to Trump on the basis of brokering peace between Congo and Rwanda, India and Pakistan, in Gaza and elsewhere and for efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Oh, and for ending wars “just right before they started,” according to Trump himself. These were, Infantino said, “exceptional actions taken in the cause of world peace.”

Social media lit up immediately after the peace prize announcement with a tsunami of scorn and derision.

“Awarding the first Fifa peace prize to a man who’s fuelled so much hate and violence is flat out shameful,” wrote one. “Fifa Peace Prize for the guy about to invade a country and is killing people in international waters with no proof?” asked another, referring to Trump’s threats to attack Venezuela and unseat its president, Nicolas Maduro. “What is next? mocked a third. “The Lawn Tennis Association Prize for Physics?”

In his short speech, Trump claimed to have “saved millions of lives,” rambled on about ticket sales, praised Infantino and thanked his wife. He closed by boasting that while the country was not doing so well a year ago, now “we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world”. He was perhaps forgetting that the US is actually co-hosting the 2026 World Cup with Mexico and Canada, both of which Trump has threatened to invade or annex and whose leaders were also present for the draw.

According to this newly crowned man of peace and his cabinet, those fleeing to the United States from wars or repression are “dangerous criminals that are murderers, rapists, money launderers” leading to “a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Somalis living in the US are “garbage” and their country “stinks,” being a place where “they just run around killing each other.”

In New Orleans, immigration officials must “target the violent criminal illegal aliens that sanctuary politicians have allowed to roam free.”

The citizens of countries that have been “flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” will no longer be able to travel to the US.

A Palestinian-US teenager from Florida, Mohammed Ibrahim, was left to waste away in an Israeli prison for nine months after being seized from his West Bank home, while the Trump administration did nothing.

“Kill everybody” is the go-to policy when unidentified small boats in Caribbean waters appear headed toward US shores.

And yes, back in 2017, some of those white supremacists marching to “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville and chanting “Jews will not replace us” — one of whom murdered a counterprotester by running her down with his vehicle — were “very fine people.”

The Trump version of caring about the people has been to follow up that hateful rhetoric with Gestapo-like actions, including raids on homes and businesses, with families dragged from their beds in the middle of the night by armed, masked immigration officers, and people snatched in the street or seized in front of their nursery class.

As for peace, the killings, disease and famine continue in Gaza. The rapes and murders have not ceased in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Russian war in Ukraine drags on unabated. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi flatly dismissed Trump’s peace-brokering claim, saying “No world leader asked us to stop the operation.”

The Gaza “peace plan” is a Trump real estate grab. The Congo-Rwanda peace plan is a Trump minerals grab. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is a bonanza for Trump’s friends in the US weapons manufacturing business, as is the Gaza genocide.

But all this, according to Fifa, merited a peace prize? Well, perhaps not according to Fifa, because despite having its name on the prize, no-one actually seems to know — or certainly won’t divulge — who in Fifa decided to create the prize, who the candidates were, if any, and who chose the winner. Infantino announced the award as the “first annual,” so some transparency around the selection process is now long overdue.

The only certainty is that the first set of fingerprints on that trophy belonged to Infantino, even before he strode onto the Kennedy Centre stage to award it to Trump. The Fifa president has been fawning all over Trump ever since he was elected to a second presidential term back in November 2023, and repeated that sycophancy on Friday, promising Trump “you can always count on my support and the support of the entire football community or soccer community.”

The Fifa peace prize was also awarded to Trump on the basis of his having “championed the unifying power of football,” evidence for which is about as elusive as the criteria underpinning the award itself.

Human rights groups had repeatedly asked Fifa for information on the prize. In a November 11 letter to Infantino, Human Rights Watch demanded to know the criteria for selection, who had been nominated, what the qualifications for winning were and the identity of the judges. “We did not have an answer to that, which you could infer that there is no process, there are no other nominees, there was no judgement,” said the group’s director of global initiatives, Minky Worden.

A coalition of trade union, media and humanitarian groups has also been pushing Fifa to ensure that human and civil rights are at the forefront in the upcoming World Cup. There are concerns about the treatment of workers, censorship of the press, homophobia, and now, especially in the US, the ability for fans from other countries to travel to the US, including two of the teams that qualified — Iran and Haiti — whose citizens are currently under a US travel ban.

Citizens from 12 countries are already banned from entering the US and seven other countries face restrictions. But recent statements from the Trump administration suggest that number could increase to as many as 36 countries.

After relocating the draw ceremony from Las Vegas to the more politically convenient showcase of DC’s Kennedy Centre, an institution where Trump has already installed himself as president, the US president has now threatened to remove World Cup matches from US host cities that are “run by radical left-wing lunatics.”

During the live broadcast of the draw ceremony extravaganza, Haitian singer and rapper Wyclef Jean, seated in the audience, was introduced as a representative of his country. Needless to say, he was not asked what he thought of Trump’s Haiti travel ban, nor Trump calling Haiti a “s—-hole” country. Most memorably, during a debate on the campaign trail with Democratic contender Kamala Harris, Trump also accused Haitians living in Ohio of “eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Trump now has another giant gold bauble — described by one wag on X as  “seemingly a depiction of severed hands pulling the earth into Hell” — to display in the already gilded-up Oval Office. He also received a medal, which he couldn’t wait to hang around his own neck, and a certificate proclaiming him a man of peace and a “dynamic leader engaged in diplomatic opportunities, de-escalation and stability.”

In Trump’s own words, “The world is a safer place now,” all thanks to him and a phony Fifa peace prize that says it is so.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer living in Takoma Park, Maryland.