Is there anything Trump wouldn’t do for an Award?
Today, Donald Trump accepted a completely made-up award: the FIFA Peace Prize.
Until the moment it was handed to him, or more accurately, until he grabbed it and flung it around his neck, it hadn’t existed. This was the first year it was awarded, and there is no criteria stated that would qualify someone to receive it. Until today, that is. It was just another fabricated honor presented in front of cameras, with all the ceremony of something earned, but none of the substance.
But that didn’t matter to President Trump. He grinned like it was the Nobel. He stood there in front of the world, beaming, soaking in the applause, as if he had personally cured all global conflicts.
Which raises a very real question: Why would one of the world’s most powerful sports organizations, one with its own long, documented history of corruption, invent a peace prize and give it to Donald Trump? Was it a thank-you for hosting them at the Kennedy Center? A move to curry favor with the U.S. government ahead of the 2026 World Cup? A PR stunt to distract from their own scandals? Whatever the reason, it wasn’t about peace. It wasn’t about diplomacy. And it certainly wasn’t about truth.
It was about creating the appearance of strength for a man who needs the illusion more than the reality. It was about flattery, the one currency he values above all else.
Because this is what he craves now. Not policy wins. Not legislative victories. Not progress for the American people. Just the performance of power. The rituals. The applause. The illusion.
He doesn’t want to be strong; he just wants to appear strong. And he’ll take that appearance from anyone willing to offer it. Whether it’s FIFA inventing an award, foreign leaders staging a handshake, or his inner circle telling him he’s brilliant while the country burns, it’s all the same to him.
Authoritarian leaders throughout history have relied on manufactured glory to prop up failing strength. The Nobel Peace Prize, a symbol of global diplomacy, was once nearly handed to Benito Mussolini. In 1935, he was nominated by two separate people, the very same year he invaded Ethiopia in a brutal colonial war that killed hundreds of thousands.
Stalin awarded himself “Hero of Socialist Labour”, not once, but multiple times. These weren’t signs of confidence. They were signs of weakness. Desperation. Decay. The more hollow a regime becomes, the more obsessed it gets with symbols, titles, and staged rituals of praise. And Trump fits that pattern perfectly.
So it should be no surprise that at the same time he accepted his “peace prize” today, the peace deal he claimed credit for just the day before, between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, already appeared to have fallen apart. Because fighting had already resumed.
And while Trump smiles for the cameras, his enablers work behind the scenes to dismantle the Constitution. Because now, even Trump’s most dangerous obsessions are inching closer to reality. He’s long fantasized about ending birthright citizenship, the constitutional guarantee that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, regardless of their parents’ status. For years, legal scholars across the political spectrum called Trump’s plan exactly what it was: unconstitutional, unenforceable, and rooted in white nationalist fantasy. And Today, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. They are slated to hear arguments next year, with a decision around the end of June.
The Court could have refused to dignify the case at all, and in any other era, they probably would have. But they didn’t. And that alone should set off every alarm. In cases like this one, where there’s no circuit split, no urgency, and a clear constitutional precedent, namely, the 14th Amendment and the Supreme Court’s own 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Court could have, and arguably should have, declined to take it up. Doing so would have left the lower court’s ruling in place, reaffirmed existing precedent, and signaled that the issue was settled. Instead, they opened the door.
In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court ruled that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, even if their parents are immigrants. Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco, was denied re-entry after a trip abroad. The Court sided with him, cementing birthright citizenship as guaranteed under the 14th Amendment, with very few exceptions.
And history warns us what that means.
Authoritarian regimes almost always begin by redrawing the borders of belonging. In Nazi Germany, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship rights, not to begin mass violence, but to legally permit it. In apartheid South Africa, Black South Africans were assigned to fictional “homelands,” erasing their status as citizens in their own country.
Stripping citizenship is never the end goal. It’s the beginning of whatever comes next.
Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship aren’t about policy. They’re about permission. The moment the state can decide who is and isn’t a “real” American, everything else becomes possible: detention without rights, deportation without cause, surveillance without oversight.
This isn’t about fixing the immigration system. It’s about building a framework where cruelty is legal, and exclusion is patriotic. And in that framework, loyalty isn’t to the Constitution, it’s to the man handing out the labels.
And what makes it even more dangerous now is that there’s no one left in his inner circle to stop him like there was in his first term. The guardrails are gone. His decline has stripped him of impulse control, and it’s made his enablers nervous, not for the country, but for themselves. They see the writing on the wall. Whether it’s his medical condition or the midterms next November, they know the window is closing. And they’ll use every minute of it to push through as much damage as they can while he’s still sitting in power.
And this isn’t just about corruption anymore. It’s about vulnerability. Trump’s physical, cognitive, and emotional decline has left us in a very dangerous position. He’s not weighing consequences. He’s not thinking about long-term strategy. When power is all he has left, and control is slipping, he clings tighter to the only thing that still gives him a hit of dopamine: being worshipped. And everyone around him knows it. That’s why they keep praising him. That’s why they hand him trophies. That’s why they stage ceremonies and choreograph applause and call him things like “The Peace President.” They know the formula. Give him a stage, give him a spotlight, and they can get whatever they want, even if what they want is unconstitutional, illegal, or dangerous.
And I wish this were the worst thing that happened today. But for children, their families, and their doctors across America, it was a dangerously dark day.
A CDC advisory panel just voted to end the decades-long recommendation to vaccinate infants against hepatitis B, a virus that can cause chronic liver disease, liver failure, and cancer. Before the universal infant vaccine recommendation was adopted in 1991, about 16,000 children in the U.S. contracted it each year, many at birth through maternal transmission. The vaccine changed that. New childhood cases dropped to lows of less than 20 a year. The CDC director still has to sign off, but historically, these advisory votes almost always become policy.
There is no credible scientific case for reversing that recommendation, only political theater. The advisory panel’s vote came after months of growing pressure from anti-vaccine activists and MAGA/MAHA influencers.
And what most people missed in this entire debate is the truth: this was never a mandate. It was a recommendation. Parents have always had the right to decline the vaccine. But now that the recommendation has been pulled, insurance coverage for it is in jeopardy. And lives will be put at risk.
Fascist regimes often begin by attacking science, not because it’s wrong, but because it refuses to serve power. The Nazis silenced Jewish and socialist physicians. The Soviet Union embraced Lysenkoism, a state-sponsored pseudoscience that denied genetics and science-based agriculture. This triggered famine, crop failure, and needless suffering. The Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly suppressed and manipulated disease data and punished doctors who tried to warn the public, to protect the regime’s image. In every case, the message was clear: protect the regime and leader, not the truth. Authoritarianism always needs a new target, and science, with its stubborn insistence on facts and expertise, is often the first to go. Because they need people who believe them, not the truth.
And the rot doesn’t stop at domestic policy. Even foreign affairs are now infected by this same pursuit of loyalty over law.
And every single day, it’s getting worse, because the man at the center of it all is getting worse. And his decay is spreading. The hate online is growing. People who are seemingly on the same side, the right side of history, are turning on each other. And with this comes exactly what the people behind Trump want.
They want us fragmented. They want us disoriented. They want us to lash out at one another, measuring our righteousness instead of building our resistance. They want us to think we’re superior to each other instead of rising up together for something greater.
We can’t let them do this.
We have to stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder, undivided, if we have any chance of slowing the destruction of this country and holding the line through the next election. This isn’t politics anymore. This is survival.
We are no longer dealing with left and right. We are dealing with fascism, with dictatorship, with authoritarianism. And Trump has stripped the worst tactics from each to create something new, something American-made, dressed up in red, white, and blue, and rooted in cruelty.
We need to stay focused and fierce. We need to organize and outlast. And we cannot, under any circumstances, let exhaustion turn into surrender.
Let them have their trophies, their fake ceremonies, their hollow thrones. We have something they will never understand: purpose. And that purpose is rooted in protecting this country from the hands that are trying to dismantle it. We fight because it’s still ours. And we’re not giving it up.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
P.S. If you’ve made it this far, chances are we see things the same way. You can help keep this work going by subscribing to my Substack; there’s a free option, or you can become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month. Paid subscriptions help me reach more people, cover more ground, and keep telling the truth about what’s happening to our country.
