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This article was originally published in Common Dreams under Creative Commons 3.0 license. Read the original article. Contact: editor@commondreams.org
By Jon Queally
The signs on the building of the United States Institute of Peace were changed overnight to include “Donald J. Trump,” adding the name of the sitting US president who, among other examples of warmongering and war-making, has openly supported the Israeli genocide in Gaza, bombed Iran, sent an aircraft carrier strike group to threaten Venezuela, and ordered the extrajudicial killings of over 80 people aboard boats in the Caribbean and Pacific in recent months.
The building’s name change preceded a meeting on Thursday between leaders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a proposed peace deal between the two warring nations is set to be signed. It also came amid an ongoing clamoring by the president to be recognized as a great maker of peace despite his record of violence, thuggery, racism, and human rights violations.
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Critics of the move were swift in their condemnation of Trump, known more for being possibly the most famous narcissist in the history of humanity than for waging anything that remotely looks like a just and lasting peace.
“This is pathetic, like a little boy running around putting ‘Property of Donald’ stickers on everything in the house,” said Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. “It’s not the Trump institute of peace, it’s the US Institute of Peace.”
Trump, who has repeatedly expressed his desire to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has a long history of supporting and conducting overseas military operations and backing the worst actors on the world stage when it comes to war crimes and human rights abuses, counting as his close allies Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, implicated by Trump’s own CIA as the person who ordered the murder and dismembering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
As foreign policy analyst John Feffer recently wrote in a column that appeared in Common Dreams, Trump “deserves” not a prize for peace, but “the opposite: a Nobel prize for war.” According to Feffer:
Trump often tries to change the fabric of reality by asserting the truth of absolute falsehoods—that former President Barack Obama was born in Africa, that the 2020 elections were stolen, that he’s the smartest person in every room.
So, too, with the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump boasts that he has ended “seven or eight” wars. It’s a questionable claim given that he was barely involved in negotiating ceasefires in several of those conflicts (Kashmir, Thailand vs. Cambodia) while some of the “successes,” like Gaza, remain largely unresolved. In the case of Egypt and Ethiopia, there wasn’t even a war to end.
Adding further irony to the new facade, Trump is the target of an active lawsuit brought by USIP staffers who were ousted from their posts following a raid on their offices by members of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, formerly led by mega-billionaire libertarian Elon Musk.
In a statement on the building’s new signage, George Foote, the lawyer representing the former USIP leadership and staff, said, “Renaming the USIP building adds insult to injury” for those impacted by Trump’s assault on the agency.
“A federal judge has already ruled that the government’s armed takeover was illegal,” added Foote. “That judgment is stayed while the government appeals, which is the only reason the government continues to control the building. The rightful owners will ultimately prevail and will restore the US Institute of Peace and the building to their statutory purposes.”
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