Susan Glasser writes:

Just after 1 P.M. on Thursday, Donald Trump appeared at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, in Washington, D.C., to preside over a signing ceremony with the Presidents of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Trump praised the two leaders for having the courage to put their names on the “very detailed, powerful agreement” to end the decades-long conflict between their countries—and praised himself for “succeeding where so many others have failed” in brokering a deal. When another attendee, Kenya’s President, William Ruto, hailed Trump’s “consequential” and “historic” and “bold leadership,” Trump stood beside him, looking pleased as could be. At the end of the ceremony, Trump took a single question from a journalist, who suggested, consistent with reports from the region, that fighting in eastern Congo had escalated in the runup to the summit and that peace was not really possible until troops actually withdrew. Not to worry, the President insisted: “It’s going to be a great miracle.”

Setting aside the question of whether Trump could identify either African nation on a map, or the dubious math behind his claim to have personally ended eight wars, the photo op had an are-you-kidding-me quality that only he could inspire. For starters, there was the awkward fact that a President famous for deriding African nations as “shithole countries” was hosting an array of leaders from the continent—not only from Rwanda, the D.R.C., and Kenya but also from Angola, Burundi, and elsewhere—just days after unleashing a bigoted rant branding all immigrants from Somalia as “garbage” and declaring they were not wanted in the United States.

There was also the matter of where the ceremony took place—at the congressionally chartered, independent think tank dedicated to fostering peace around the world that Trump had shuttered earlier this year. When the institute’s staff resisted, the Administration fired most of them and staged an armed takeover, which was later ruled a “gross usurpation of power” by a federal judge. None of which stopped the State Department from announcing, late on Wednesday, that it had renamed the institute for Trump, or from affixing his name in giant silver letters to the building’s façade in preparation for Thursday’s ceremony. “Thank you for putting a certain name on that building,” Trump said as his guests looked on. “That’s a great honor. It really is.”

As for the timing of the event, our self-styled “President of PEACE” held it in the midst of a full-blown Washington scandal over the conduct of his newly renamed Department of War and the former TV host who leads it, Pete Hegseth. In the hours before Trump’s photo op, a congressional committee met behind closed doors to review footage of a U.S. military strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the Caribbean, in September, which included a follow-on attack to blow up two survivors of the initial salvo—a possible war crime that, according to the Washington Post, resulted from Hegseth’s verbal order to kill them all. (Hegseth and the White House have both denied that Hegseth gave the order.) After viewing the video, Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called it “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”

To be clear: that September attack was no isolated incident. Trump has now ordered more than twenty deadly strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats from Venezuela, killing an estimated eighty-three people. His Administration has yet to release the legal justification that the Pentagon is relying on for the strikes, or evidence to support its claims that those killed were, in fact, drug traffickers. Even if they were—as the Republican congressman Mike Turner, of Ohio, the former chair of the Intelligence Committee, pointed out on Thursday morning—drug dealing is not subject to the penalty of extrajudicial death by missile. [Continue reading…]