This is one of the great honours in the life of Donald Trump. The President received a peace prize, but not the one he was looking for. At the 2026 Final Draw of the FIFA World Cup at the Kennedy Centre, Gianni Infantino announced that he was presenting his first-ever FIFA Peace Prize to “close friend” Donald Trump.
AP reported Trump, who has often spoken of his desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize, had been widely expected to secure FIFA’s newly minted honour. When he stepped up to accept the medal, he acknowledged, “I want to thank, by the way, my family, my great First Lady, Melania.”
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“This is truly one of the great honours of my life, and beyond awards, Gianni and I were discussing this. We saved millions and millions of lives.”
While the applause inside the hall was polite, the response online was hilarious.
Memes flooded X within minutes. “You noticed he put it (the medal) on himself,” one quipped.
“There is no such thing as FIFA Peace Prize. It is fictional,” another commented.
“That’s going right next to Madueke’s club World Cup medal,” one posted.
The jokes only snowballed from there. “Trump thanking Melania like it’s the Nobel, wild,” a user commented. Others quipped, “How cute, Donald gets a participation award.”
Then one joked, “Since when did FIFA award Peace Prizes?” Someone else chimed in: “So nice, he got a participation medal.” And yet another called it a “totally made-up prize.”
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Notably, after the Nobel went to Venezuelan activist María Corina Machado in October, users wasted no time drawing parallels. One joked, “A miracle happened: Trump received the Peace Prize but not the Nobel Prize. Donald became the first-ever winner of the FIFA Peace Prize. For Trump’s sake, they came up with a new prize – what can’t you do to prevent the child from crying?”
Interestingly, in October, Trump received the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Architect of Peace Award. The foundation said the award celebrated those “who advance his lifelong goal of fostering global peace.”
