Can anyone else spot the glaring thing wrong with this photo of Trump’s ‘board of peace’?

Let’s start with the astonishing lack of women at the inauguration of Trump’s shiny new gimmick and take it from there, writes Kat Brown

So then, here is Trump’s current draft of the Gaza “board of peace”, a rendition of the word more in keeping with George Orwell’s Ministry of Peace in 1984, which the Trump administration, with its Department of War, increasingly seems to be taking for an assembly manual.

Like a cross between a despot and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s pampered Augustus Gloop, a delighted Trump pointed at the array of suits that surrounded him, with Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani the lone woman in a sea of testosterone and bad tailoring.

Invitations went out to 60 countries, and 21 said yes. Presumably few could resist the option of forking over a billion dollars to ensure a permanent place in Trump’s own Goons Show.

Glaringly absent from the board (other than women, who were, presumably, at home tending to laundry) were Palestinians and Arab-speakers. Had any been present, they might have ensured that the language in Jared Kushner’s PowerPoint presentation was formatted and grammatically correct. Instead, it played out like a property sales pitch built by ChatGPT. Some peace plan, that.

“Once this board is completely formed, we can do pretty much whatever we want to do,” said Trump, before brandishing a charter for the leaders to sign, peacefully. “And we’ll do it in conjunction with the United Nations.”

(AFP/Getty)

Judging by the board’s new logo, Trump sees that “conjunction” as a total eclipse. It doesn’t so much borrow from that of the UN as take it in a chokehold, dump it in a load of gold paint, and then swivel the globe around so that only America appears. Copyright law is really going to have a fun time of it.

Predictably, this has gone down with leaders like a bucket of cold, gold-coloured sick. When Karoline Leavitt, head of Trump’s Ministry of Truth, announced that Belgium had joined the board, Belgium’s foreign minister replied with a distinctly un-Gallic use of emojis and block caps that “Belgium has NOT signed the Charter of the Board of Peace,” adding, “This announcement is incorrect,” which is the closest that any diplomat, let alone Belgium, can get to telling Trump’s spokesperson exactly what they think.

Back to the board’s charter. Trump’s signature, as made famous by its inclusion in the Epstein Files, appears to have acquired some more squiggles, in the manner of a seismograph having a heart attack.

Unpredictability keeps the mouse pressing the button in the hope that something good will come out. Global leaders have been anxiously pressing the button for over a decade, in the hope that Trump will see sense, but nothing follows. Whether he is deranged or showing “disinhibition” as the term goes, the cartoon depictions of him as a toddler or a baby are certainly correct. He is the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle of what has four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening (“a man”) except that, rather than having a stick, his own old age has him reverting to the tantrums of babyhood, anchored both by the preening vanity that has kept him through his adult life, and his iron-clad refusal to see anything he doesn’t want to.

The past decade of US populism has been like living in an extended rendition of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Trump’s administration, useless, feckless and mean with power, will only spout that their leader is magnificently clad. The crowd of anxious world leaders, used to diplomacy rather than tariff threats and policies unveiled via Truth Social, has stood in the crowd half-heartedly cheering.

As the story goes, it’s only an innocent child that can puncture the illusion by pointing out that the Emperor is naked. On Wednesday, that child was Minnesotan Liam Ramos, just five years old, still in his school backpack and blue bunny hat, being used by Trump’s ICE police as bait for his family before being sent to a detention facility in Texas, alone. The child in the story can’t stand up to the US. It’s time the grown-ups in the room recognised that they need to – and must.