The Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal is Trumpism’s biggest triumph.
President Donald Trump is likely to see it as validation of his contempt for orthodox establishment peacemaking, traditional foreign policy dogmas and presidential caution. It’s a win for unpredictability, supping with tyrants and using real estate moguls as negotiators to chase the art of the deal.
Trump spent Monday glowing from the kind of universal adulation in Israel that he never receives stateside. He also appeared in Egypt with world leaders, many of whom reject his “America First” populism but still dropped everything to rush to his side.
The most unqualified global success of Trump’s two presidencies raises many possibilities, including the unlikely prospect that the unusual sensation of being loved abroad might prompt him to seek affirmation at home by tempering his vitriolic leadership style.
And it raises many questions, too:
► Can the deal, which saw 20 Israeli hostages return home alive, become more than a snatched moment of hope in the Middle East’s tortured history? Does it really mean “the war in Gaza is over”? Or is that typical Trump hyperbole?
► To that end, will vital issues that Trump left unaddressed on Monday — most notably the massive omission of offering Palestinians a true say in their own future — derail his big win? Trump is far from the first American statesman to herald the “historic dawn of a new Middle East.” But the failure to end the Palestinian question has produced endless false dawns.
► The answer to the above question may depend on this one: Will Trump stay engaged when the big-splash declaration of the initial deal has passed? His 20-point peace deal calls for an international peace force for Gaza; for Hamas to give up its weapons and its grip on Gaza; and for a global coalition of Arab states and others to rebuild the devastated Gaza Strip. None of this is likely to happen without Trump’s constant attention for the rest of his term. And ultimately, the blueprint hints at the possibility of a Palestinian state — a condition Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes. Trump is no details man. But maybe it will be different with his greatest legacy achievement on the line.
► Trump’s success in the Middle East was an impressive affirmation of US global power, which has often seemed tarnished in recent years. His White House image-makers often claim America is now more respected with him back in office. For once, this week there was evidence to back up the spin. What therefore are the implications for Trump’s other global ventures, for instance, his stalled peace push in Ukraine?
► Presidents love to look authoritative abroad and hope it enhances their standing at home. The coming days will show whether Trump’s biggest win yet alters the dynamics of domestic politics — especially with the country mired in a domestic political crisis, with House Speaker Mike Johnson warning Monday of “one of the longest shutdowns in American history.”
► “We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to put the old feuds and bitter hatreds behind us,” Trump said on Monday, referring to the angst of the Middle East. It was striking to hear a president who has fostered such domestic division make such a plea. It’s probably naive to think the man who says he loves to make peace abroad might do a little more to foster domestic harmony.
Trump’s supporters can make a plausible case that the ceasefire deal proves many of his critics wrong.
His strategy of trusting his gut and of treating the world’s most intractable political issue primarily as a real estate and economic question — rather than through a web of historical enmity — has so far worked. His much-maligned negotiator Steve Witkoff, a fellow real estate tycoon, suddenly has a win on his resume. And Trump’s recall of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, also a real estate magnate, seems to have been decisive, despite the potential ethical questions posed by his business interests in the Gulf.
Trump’s approach to the Middle East across his two terms meanwhile trashed many conventional State Department approaches and adopted a shoot-first-and-ask-question-later approach more typical of right-wing Israeli Likud leaders like Netanyahu. He moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He ordered the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general who built a now-destroyed regional proxy network, at a Baghdad airport in 2020. And early in his second term, Trump ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear program that also accelerated a regional geopolitical transformation.
None of these big risks ignited violence and reprisals for the United States on the scale that many experts had always predicted. But they did create a bond with Israelis that Trump turned into political leverage he could use to pressure Netanyahu when the time was right.
There are counterarguments to this thesis — not least the question of why Trump didn’t intervene earlier and save some of the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, attacks. European nations that recently recognized a Palestinian state might also wonder whether their tactics that isolated Israel also heaped pressure on Netanyahu to agree to end the Israeli operation.
But Trump can argue, for now at least, that ignoring all normal approaches worked for him. If this worked in the Middle East, could it be successful elsewhere? And should his critics reassess his methods?
For instance, economists have mostly warned that the president’s adoption of tariff policies that fractured the global free trading regime court disaster, will spike inflation and could spark a recession. And there’s been no mass return of factories to the US — the ostensible purpose of the strategy. But worst-case scenarios haven’t come true either, and the US economy is still growing.
One lesson that Trump could draw from his success in the Middle East is a reevaluation of his approach to the Ukraine war.
During the first eight months of his presidency, his efforts to end the Gaza and Ukraine wars suffered from a common deficiency — his failure to match peace plans and photo-op meetings with top leaders with meaningful pressure. But following an Israeli strike in Qatar against Hamas negotiators last month, he significantly hardened his tone toward Netanyahu — unveiling his 20-point peace plan in conjunction with Arab states and boxing the Israeli leader into accepting it.
Perhaps he will now be encouraged to impose similar duress on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who basked in Trump’s summit invite to Alaska, then escalated his brutal attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is headed to Washington on Friday amid talk the US might soon provide Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kyiv that would allow him to take the war deep into Russian territory.
Could Trump emulate his role as a peacemaker abroad with a more conciliatory approach at home? After all, he seemed to really enjoy being loved.
This seems unlikely given the callous edge that his administration often displays — from his ruthless firings of federal workers, to which Trump has returned during the shutdown, and his open attempts to manipulate the justice system to punish his enemies, as seen in the prosecutions of former FBI chief James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James in recent weeks. His obsession with avenging past political and personal quarrels suggests he sees few analogies between his call to end “old feuds and bitter hatreds” in the Middle East and his behavior at home.
Still, the drive to make deals that powered Trump’s approach to Gaza could still complicate life for Speaker Johnson. With Capitol Hill Republicans vowing no compromise, Trump last week eradicated one of the GOP’s pressure points against Democrats by finding a workaround to ensure that military personnel will not miss paychecks over the government shutdown. And he’s seemed more open to the idea of talking to Democrats about extending Affordable Care Act subsidies than some of his party’s congressional leaders.
Trump’s Gaza deal is something of an anomaly. The president has defined his life, business career and political journey as a set of binary confrontations in which he sets out to crush opponents. But if his rhetoric is to be believed, his peacemaking is more altruistic: While he’s endless complaining he’s not yet won the Nobel Peace Prize, it does seem less exclusively geared to what is best for Trump than his domestic ventures.
But given the track record of an acerbic president obsessed with vengeance and slaying establishments, it’s probably too much to hope that he might become a leader who heals domestic divides rather than slashing open new ones.
Indeed, there were signs that Trump has concluded from his big win that he needs to be even less cognizant of the rule of law than he already has been.
For instance, he lavished praise on autocratic Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who hosted a peace-deal signing, but who is accused of human rights abuses and repression. “They have very little crime … because they don’t play games,” Trump said. He was referring to his own bid to send troops to several Democratic-run cities that, unlike those in Egypt, have the capacity to challenge his autocratic impulses in an independent legal system. “They don’t play games like we do in the United States with governors that have no idea what they’re doing,” Trump said.
Trump also lionized other regional strongmen, including the authoritarian leaders of Qatar, who played a key role in pressuring Hamas and who earlier this year obliterated the concept of presidential ethics by gifting him a jumbo jet he plans to use as Air Force One. And he lauded Turkey’s hard-man leader President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, both of whom preside over states known for oppression, imprisoning opponents and suppressing free expression.
“He’s such a tough guy, he is as tough as you can be, but we love him,” Trump said of Erdogan.
There’s no doubt that Trump’s relationships with some of the Middle East’s hard men were instrumental in bringing the Gaza ceasefire to fruition. And every president must deal with leaders many Americans might find unsavory in pursuit of US interests. But Trump seems happier in the company of corrupt Middle East despots who, like him, have no compunctions about mixing personal business and political interests than with democratic allied leaders. “I like the tough people better than I like the soft, easy ones. I don’t know what the hell that is,” Trump quipped in Egypt. “That’s a personality problem, I suspect.”
His contempt for the law also shone through a stunning moment in his speech to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, when he urged President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu — who denies corruption after facing allegations of taking gifts from overseas businessmen. “Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares,” he said.
Trump’s Middle East triumph is the kind of legacy win that can change presidents. But his reverence for unconstrained power and his envy of leaders immune from legal and political constraints that he’s eroded — but that still exist in the United States — explain why it probably won’t.
After all, he really doesn’t want to change.
Asked by a reporter on Air Force One Sunday night whether the ceasefire deal would ease his path into eternal bliss, he joked, “I mean, I’m being a little cute. I don’t think there’s anything going to get me in heaven … I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound.”