Tony Blair helps Donald Trump arrange an alliance of supervillains
Despite the UK politely declining to join Trump’s club of international miscreants and rogue states, former Prime Minister Tony Blair sat on the front row and applauded
Tony Blair is on the executive board of Trump’s new “Board of Peace”(Image: Getty Images)
Donald Trump is setting up an alliance of supervillains to undermine the United Nations, and Tony Blair is helping out.
Trump’s motivations for setting up a “Board of Peace” can be traced back to two events. The first was the 2009 decision by the Nobel committee to award that year’s peace prize to Barack Obama, a man Trump hates with a fire hotter than Satan’s pottery kiln.
Pursuit of a Nobel of his own was the inciting factor in his inserting himself into the struggle to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
The original idea of the Board of Peace was to work towards and maintain peace in Gaza, and arrange for its reconstruction.
The second event was a day last September when Trump arrived at the United Nations to give a speech at the General Assembly. Halfway up the escalator, one of his videographers dropped something into the works of the moving stairway and it unceremoniously stopped, forcing the 79 year old President and his 55 year old wife to climb four or five stairs under their own steam.
Upon reaching the UN debating chamber, the autocue displays didn’t work properly, so he suffered the indignity of having to read the parts of the speech he bothered to delver as written from paper. Of course, he decided these two innocuous tech glitches as a conspiracy to make him look like an idiot, something he’s more than capable of doing for himself.
We think it was at this point that Trump decided he wanted to get rid of the United Nations altogether and replace it with something else. Maybe with him in charge.
Fast forward to today, and Trump confirmed the starting lineup of the Board of Peace, its new “global” remit and the fact that he will be chairman for life. Or until he gets bored.
The motivation behind Tony Blair’s involvement in the body is much more difficult to divine. He’s old pals with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. And in keeping with his predilection for inserting himself into conflict resolution overseas, particularly in the Middle East, he reportedly started chatting with Jared about the future of Gaza long before Trump took office.
Many expected Blair to appear publicly queasy when Trump came out with his mad plan to rebuild Gaza as some kind of Mediterranean Las Vegas resort. A slick tourist destination literally built on the rubble of Palestinian homes. But he didn’t.
And the former Labour PM is still very much a part of the plan. Even after the UK balked at the idea of being part of a club that Russia had been invited to join, Blair sat on the front row of the launch event in Davos, a member of its executive board.
Trump stood up in front of the new body’s logo – which is exactly like the UN logo, except drenched in gold and depicting North and South America as being the entire world – and introduced the Supervillains making up his Evil UN.
Two at a time, they sat either side of him and signed up to the body – formally installing daddy Trump as the leader of their band of despots for as long as he breathes.
There was Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian PM who has persecuted LGBT people and has close ties with Putin. There was Javier Milei, the President of Argentina, who has cracked down on peaceful protest and is on the hook to the US to the tune of $20 billion – a loan that helped him get re-elected.
Leaders and representatives from Bahrain, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Qatar, Kosovo, Morocco, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Pakistan, Paraguay, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE were all in attendance.
Of the 20 countries officially signed up, just two are considered to be “free” by Freedom House. Of the remaining 18, 11 are considered ‘not free’, meaning they have serious restrictions on political rights and civil liberties. The remaining seven are considered “partly free”, meaning they have limited political and civil liberties, restrictions on opposition parties, media censorship or constraints on the rule of law.
Israel has agreed to join the body, but Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to attend the ceremony because there is a very real risk that if he sets foot in mainland Europe he’ll be arrested for war crimes.
You get the sense from Donald Trump that the one thing he hates about being President is the fact that one day – in theory at least – he won’t be President any more. It’s possible that by installing himself as everlasting leader of this club of miscreants and rogue states, Trump thinks he is fulfilling the childhood dream of Boris Johnson and is on the way to being “world king” – a throne he can theoretically sit on long after the people of the United States tire of him.
