I Might Owe Chris Hayes an Apology If This Shitshow Was What He Meant by Useful
- john raymond
- Dec 6, 2025
- 2 min read
There is a universe—thin, fragile, shimmering like heat over asphalt—where Chris Hayes might have been right. It’s not this universe, of course, the one with object permanence and a functioning memory.
But in some alternate plane, where definitions invert and humiliation counts as leverage, maybe Hayes’ old argument that President Trump’s craving for the Nobel Peace Prize was “useful” finally cashes out.
Because if this—the spectacle of the FIFA Peace Prize, the most chaotically unserious honor ever stapled together by a scandal-soaked sports bureaucracy—is what Hayes had in mind, then yes. I may owe him an apology.
Because this is useful. Not for international diplomacy, not for de-escalation, not for anything involving the word “peace,” but useful in the most devastatingly comic way imaginable: it reveals, in real time, just how bottomless Trump’s childish need for validation truly is.
Hayes claimed Trump’s supposed desire for a real peace prize could be exploited. That vanity, he said, gave the world leverage. That if we dangled prestige in front of him, he might behave.
It was always a fantasy—an MSNBC bedtime story for people who still believed narcissists could be steered by the better angels of their egos. I argued then, loudly and repeatedly, that Hayes had it backwards: Trump didn’t covet legitimacy; he coveted the stage on which legitimacy could be dragged down and mocked.
But now look at this glorious meltdown of a moment. Look at the grotesque little trophy ceremony we have been handed by the cosmos: FIFA—a group so corrupt it makes Tammany Hall look like a church picnic—suddenly deciding it is in the peace business, and promptly awarding Trump a prize no one had ever heard of until five minutes ago.
It is so unserious, so amateurish, so perfectly misaligned with reality that it achieves something close to conceptual art.
And MAGA? They lap it up. Because a movement stripped of dignity will take any scrap of validation, even if it comes from the same people who can’t assign a World Cup without consulting a bribe spreadsheet.
So yes, in this very specific, deeply ironic sense, Chris Hayes was right. Trump’s vanity was useful—but not in the way Hayes imagined. Not as leverage for peace, but as an x-ray of rot. As a spotlight on a political movement so desperate for legitimacy that it will cheerfully pretend a surprise-prize from an embattled soccer federation is a thunderbolt from Olympus.
This is the utility Hayes never understood he was describing: the utility of watching MAGA humiliate itself. The utility of seeing a once-powerful faction so spiritually bankrupt that it must cling to an award that reads like a punchline.
It is the utility of witnessing, in real time, how delusion metastasizes when a movement rejects reality altogether.
If this is what Hayes meant—if “useful” was code for “eventually this man’s vanity will collapse into a self-parody so loud it will shake the rafters”—then yes. I might owe Chris an apology.
But only if he clarifies one thing: Was this the plan all along, Chris? Was the great theory really that Trump would debase himself so thoroughly that he’d wind up accepting a peace prize from FIFA?
If so, then bravo. You were right.
And God help us all.
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