The embarrassing truth behind President Donald Trump’s made-up peace prize has been exposed.
The president, who turns 80 this week, had long pined for the Nobel Peace Prize, but he was snubbed last year in favor of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.
Gianni Infantino, the president of soccer’s global governing body, FIFA, sensed an opportunity and cooked up the ‘FIFA Peace Prize’ to soothe Trump. He did so because a closer relationship with the U.S. president would mean a smoother World Cup, which, in turn, would help repair his organization’s image after years of fraud and neglect.
Infantino, a former lawyer from Switzerland, had lobbied for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but quickly devised a plan when he was overlooked, according to The New York Times.
Just weeks after the snub, senior officials at the organization, a nonprofit with billions of dollars in its coffers, were informed of the plan.
According to the Times, they asked how much time they would have to pull off the ingenious stroke of bootlickery. They also needed to know what the criteria for the award would be and how the nomination committee would be structured.
In place of answers, some officials were told immediately that Trump would be the winner, and the plan was to stage a charade to please him, the Times reported, citing an insider.
The insider said that they learned of the prize and its winner on the same day.
Even the design of the prize, a garish collection of gold hands holding up a globe, was haphazard. The gong, which Trump called one of the “great honors of my life” to receive, was actually plucked from a collection of work from an employee’s father, who happened to be a sculptor, two officials claimed. They said that FIFA had the object in its miscellany collection and chose to use it given the tight deadline imposed on them.
It was handed to the president at the World Cup draw in December at the Kennedy Center in D.C. FIFA actually wanted to have the bash, a hot ticket in the soccer calendar, in Las Vegas until Paolo Zampolli, a longtime Trump ally serving as a presidential envoy, forced Infantino to reconsider, citing the difficulty of moving the president without a fuss.
“To move the president of the United States is a big process,” he recalled saying, according to the Times. He said a venue local to Trump would be much easier to pull off.
“You know how important FIFA is for us,” Zampolli said. FIFA, however, said in a statement to the Times that he had no influence over the choice.
Some soccer officials were angered by the circus, saying it blew up FIFA’s claims of political neutrality. The president of Norway’s soccer federation, who is a human rights lawyer, declared that the prize breached FIFA’s rules on political neutrality and announced that Norway would back an ethics complaint against Infantino and his shilling.
FIFA and the White House have been contacted for comment.
