President Donald Trump’s peace plan for the Middle East was praised by MSNBC panelists Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, and David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist, on Thursday.
“As ever, it depends on how the chapter ends. But the beginning of this chapter is remarkable. And one of the things about honesty and citizenship and a sense of, I would say, maturity about what people in a democracy should do is even if someone with whom you disagree about 99 things, does the 100 really well, you should say so, because that’s what intellectual honesty is. And so all credit to President Trump and his, as you say, unconventional team,” Meacham told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Hamas agreed this week to a peace deal pushed by Trump to end the war in Gaza and return the hostages, two years after the terror group attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Ignatius told the co-hosts that Trump was able to do what former President Joe Biden was not.
“I can remember in the month or so after Oct. 7, an Israeli senior official saying to me, ‘We are so disoriented and traumatized by this war, the United States is going to have to make decisions for us.’ Joe Biden could never do that, and Donald Trump was able to do it — did it at the decisive moment — when he said, essentially, this war must end and Israel cannot annex the West Bank, which many right-wing Israelis wanted,” he said.
Ignatius said Trump’s team, including Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, reached out to the Arabs and developed important relationships.
“What’s interesting about that, Joe and Mika, is that it took ideas from all over the Arab world — from the UAE, from Qatar, from Saudi Arabia, from Tony Blair in Britain — and pulled them all together into a single plan with the U.S. weight of support behind it. That’s how we got here. And in each case, it’s Trump deciding these people, endless combatants, cannot do it on their own. ‘I’m going to intervene forcefully.’ Tragically, that is something that Joe Biden, for all his desire for peace, wasn’t able to do,” he said.
This is an excerpt from an article by Fox News’ Hanna Panreck