31 July—So Donald Trump is boasting that thanks to his magnificent Board of Peace the wonderful folks in Hamas have agreed to disarm as the first phase of a Gaza ceasefire. Wow! As of this writing, though, Israel hasn’t agreed to bupkes. Because the Israelis aren’t so dumb as to trust Hamas with anything, let alone peace. (And many if not most Israelis don’t trust Trump either.) Doubtless, Trump is bullying his pal of convenience Bibi Netanyahu to agree to the ceasefire, mostly to make Trump look good. So we’ll see what happens. But let’s not count on anything.

Donald Trump often calls himself the President of Peace and his faithful flunkies compound the con by referring to their lord and master as the Peacemaker in Chief. We won’t linger on what principled people and institutions call him.

The Peacemaker in Chief’s signal accomplishment is of course his self-vaunted scam called the Board of Peace, which surprisingly isn’t called the Donald J. Trump Board of Peace. It’s commonly known as the BOP, an initialism in which the letters are pronounced individually, rather than an acronym in which BOP is a word—which in this case would not be inappropriate.

In all events, true to form, Trump has made himself the chairman and absolute dictator of BOP, including but not limited to control over membership—which costs member states a billion dollars for a three-year term—and strategy of the BOP travesty. Trump first proposed his BOP last September as a plan to end the Gaza war and (of course) win the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s since expanded his BOP’s remit beyond Gaza, thus serving only to further undermine the already undermined United Nations.

Here are the nations that Trump invited to join his BOP which have accepted and pledged but not necessarily paid their billion-dollar dues. Note the dictatorships:

Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United States (really!?), Uzbekistan, Vietnam.

Evidently Trump invited Belarus, an ally of Russia, to sign up. And it did. But Trump’s weaponized State Department refused visas for the Belarus delegation. Go figure.

Here are states that, along with the European Union, have sent observers to Trump’s BOP but have yet to accept or have declined membership:

Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, United Kingdom (even though former Labour PM Tony Blair is on Trump’s BOP executive board).

Here are states that have been invited to sign up and pay for Trump’s BOP but have neither responded nor attended as observers:

Australia, Brazil, Red China (because Nationalist China doesn’t officially exist), Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Singapore.

Here are the states that have declined Trump’s self-serving invitation to join his BOP: France, Ireland, New Zealand, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Vatican City (not surprising), Ukraine (rather surprising, all things considered).

And here’s the extra-special state that Trump invited to subscribe to his ludicrous BOP but subsequently uninvited in one of his hissy fits:

Canada (what’s there to say?) . . .