The image ofDonald Trumpriding out his post-White House years on a golf cart in Mar-a-Lago sunshine has never quite matched the man himself. Now, according to his top envoy inIsrael, it is time to retire that fantasy altogether.
In a striking interview given in Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee, the 70-year-old US Ambassador to Israel and former Arkansas governor, said Trump has 'no plans to slow down' after his second term ends in January 2028. Far from fading into the lucrative lecture circuit, Huckabee says, Trump is already plotting his next act — as a self-styled global peacemaker.
'He's not going to sit in a rocking chair on a front porch and just play golf once a week,' Huckabee insisted. 'He's incapable of settling down.'
At the centre of this promised reinvention is the Board of Peace (BoP), a new international body Trump launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. Huckabee describes it as Trump's 'next project in life', and says the former reality-TV star and property tycoon could continue to chair the board long after he leaves the Oval Office.
Whether that sounds reassuring or ominous will depend very much on how one views Trump's record so far.
The Board of Peace is still in its infancy, but it is not a mere think-tank vanity project. The UN Security Council has authorised the board to oversee certain aspects of the fragile Gaza ceasefire — a detail that has alarmed some diplomats who fear a parallel structure encroaching on UN authority.
Huckabee's comments, published on Friday 6 February 2026, come just ahead of the BoP's first formal meeting, scheduled for 19 February at the United States Institute of Peace headquarters in Washington, DC. The symbolism is obvious: borrowing the language and setting of institutional peacebuilding, but imprinting it with Trump's trademark preference for disruption and deal-making.
The ambassador portrays the Board of Peace as a deliberate rebuke to what Trump's circle sees as the stale rituals of multilateral diplomacy.
'These are people who want to actually do some heavy lifting,' Huckabee said, drawing a sharp contrast with what he derided as conventional bureaucrats. The emphasis, he argues, will be on 'concrete outcomes' in places where traditional diplomacy has failed or simply run out of ideas.
That language will grate in European capitals, where scepticism about the entire project is already thick. Western European allies have largely balked at the structure taking shape in Davos, wary that a Trump-branded peace board with quasi-official UN blessings could erode the UN's role and diminish painstakingly built post-war institutions.
Source: International Business Times UK
