Donald Trump’s soccer pal will use the Kennedy Center free of charge to present a new peace prize cooked up after the MAGA president was snubbed for the Nobel Peace Prize, according to The Washington Post.
FIFA, soccer’s worldwide ruling body, has had rental fees for using the venue waived, the outlet reported, ahead of staging the 2026 World Cup Draw there early next month.
FIFA is expected to take over a swathe of the Kennedy Center’s performance spaces for a period of three weeks, significantly disrupting other scheduled events, with several concerts being relocated or postponed.
Trump has cultivated an unusually close relationship with Infantino ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which is set to be co-hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
It’s further understood that at the draw, which determines which teams play in which groups during the first stage of next year’s tournament, FIFA will present the winner of its new Peace Prize, intended to “reward individuals who have taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace and by doing so have united people across the world.”
The award, the first of its kind in FIFA’s 121-year history, was announced by FIFA president Gianni Infantino ahead of his meeting with President Donald Trump last week.
While Trump is expected to attend next month’s draw, and therefore the award ceremony, there has been no public indication as to whether he may be among the prospective recipients of the prize.
Infantino’s announcement of FIFA’s new award was made as Trump reeled from not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, despite his high-profile self-promotion campaign to try to persuade the Nobel committee he was worthy.
The snub, in turn, followed a highly public lobbying campaign by the president and his allies to secure him that award, buoyed in part by Trump’s highly dubious and thoroughly disputed claims to have solved between six and nine of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
The prize eventually went instead to Venezuela’s exiled opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado. In its official statement on this year’s honor, the Nobel Committee praised her for keeping “the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness” in what many commentators took as a jab at Trump’s newfound authoritarianism.
The Daily Beast has reached out to FIFA, the White House, and the Kennedy Center for comment on this story.
