Missing cash for Trump’s Board of Peace shows how hollow his promises are

When Donald Trump held the first meeting of his “Board of Peace” in February, he said it was the “most consequential board” in history. With typical hyperbole, the US President announced that the board would rebuild Gaza after the war with Israel and that “what we’re doing is very simple – peace”.

Four months on, it has proved to be anything but.

According to the Financial Times, the fund for the board, which solicited $1bn “lifetime membership” fees from each nation, has yet to receive any money from donors. “Zero dollars have been deposited,” one source told the newspaper. The fraction of the $7bn pledged that has been sent to the board has not landed in its official accounts run by the World Bank, but in its private JP Morgan account, where there is far less oversight and accountability.

The hustle feels all too familiar by now: big reveal, big promises, big names involved – in this case, Sir Tony Blair as one of the leaders of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), another questionable Trump outfit related to the Board of Peace.

At its core, this was never about helping Gaza, it was about making Trump seem like a peacemaker. Trump’s use of the US government to generate personal wealth is unlike anything America has ever seen, and the brazenness of his grift seems to grow by the week.

His most outrageous pitch is the $1.776bn “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to pay compensation to people who feel they have been unfairly targeted by the US government. In Trump’s case, that will include the mob who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, after the President urged them to “fight like hell” in a speech nearby at the Ellipse. Even staunchly loyal Republicans have baulked at this, a sign of just how egregious the proposal is.

Trump’s obsession with being a peacemaker stands in comical contrast to his turn as the bomber-in-chief during his second administration. The President claimed last month that he ended eight wars in eight months – overlooking the fact he started quite a few as well.

He did get the Nobel Peace Prize he desperately wanted, but only after being given the trophy by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the rightful winner. Given her lack of billions, she resorted to giving the President the only thing she could to curry favour with him.

The tragedy of the Board of Peace is that it isn’t like other Trump grifts like Trump Mobile, a project launched by the President’s family last year. In that case, buyers had to pay a $100 deposit for what they were told was an all-American-made phone that would ship in August last year. Consumers finally got the $499 device last month after their $100 was quietly converted into a “conditional opportunity” to purchase it, and all-American became designed with “American values in mind”.

Instead, the Board of Peace’s existence means that less of the money will likely go to Gaza, a territory whose health ministry puts the death toll from the Israel war at 75,000. Entire sections of Gaza have been flattened and Trump is positioning himself to cash in, posting online a bizarre AI-generated video of a Miami-like development on its land, featuring a giant gold statue of himself.

According to the FT, Morocco has contributed $20m to fund the office of Nickolay Mladenov, the “high representative” for post-war Gaza and salaries for a committee to run the strip.

The UAE has sent $100m to train Gaza’s new police force. But even that money is said to be frozen and the police force programme has yet to start.

Abu Dhabi understands that it doesn’t really matter, because that’s not what the cash is for.

It’s actually about demonstrating loyalty to a President who values it through one thing only: money.