I don’t want to distract you from the end of Phase I of the Federal Invasion of Minnesota, or the continuing oil-cash shakedown in Venezuela. Or the administration’s one-month-and-counting defiance of the law requiring disclosure of the Epstein files, but …

… wait, where was I going with this?

Right: The peace grift.

I’m not sure how DJT got this Board of Peace (BoP) thing in a position to pick up a U.N. Security Council endorsement late last year. I guess it acknowledged the BoP’s primary mission to oversee the Israel/Hama “ceasefire.” Let’s put a pin in that.

The key thing is that now Trump is cranking up the wheels of the grift. The BoP will supposedly take on conflict resolution beyond Israel/Gaza. The BoP will comprise a number of countries serving three-year terms — unless they pony up $1 billion each for a permanent buy-in. And naturally, Trump is the chairman.

If you’re reading this, then you probably heard all that yesterday. Just your standard U.N.-circumventing, pay-for-play, world-manipulating council, right? Except it’s worse than you thought. Not only would Trump chair this ongoing concern, but according to a draft charter reported by CNBC and Bloomberg:

The chair chooses which countries to invite (and, equally importantly, not invite).

The chair controls the money (which is theoretically for Gaza reconstruction, at least at first).

And here’s the kicker: While decisions would be taken by a majority, with each member state present getting one vote, all decisions would be subject to the chair’s approval.

So the chairman is a bit like the car rental company in Seinfeld. The chair would take the Board’s decision, but he wouldn’t necessarily hold the Board’s decision. I mean, anyone can just take ’em:

That’s a lot of trust for any legitimate government to invest (along with a billion dollars) in someone from another country. The BoP would be hard pressed to find anyone more deserving than a double-impeached president, a felon with a long record of bankruptcies and charity-related misconduct. Not to mention yesterday’s admission that he’s considering invading a foreign country because it didn’t give him an award he wanted.

If that resume doesn’t say Fiscally Responsible and Respected Champion of Peace, I don’t know what does.

If this were just about sales, I’d sleep well knowing this thing is dead in the water. Other heads of state should see this as the “lend me your credibility and give me your cash” con that it is. And it makes me feel a smidge better that Trump’s “stay in office to stay out of jail” bedfellow Netanyahu is sending up his own red flags regarding the grift.

But since this enterprise’s fate in the mid-term will really be about intimidation and leverage and how well an amoral current leader of an exceptionally powerful country can hustle leaders out of their citizens’ lunch money, it could go either way.

Let’s choose optimism, for now.