In May, he denounced the debacles of “neocons” and “interventionists”, vowing a future “where people of different nations, religions and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence”.
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If Trump can untie the Gordian knot of the Middle East, it will be a spectacular feat – although it will have been accomplished by accommodating Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal annihilation and starvation of Gaza. And, of course, there’s probably some money in it for him and his family somewhere.
But the region is a graveyard of peace deals. As David Sanger wrote in The New York Times: “Much could go wrong in coming days, and in the Middle East it often does. The ‘peace’ deal Mr Trump heralded on Truth Social on Wednesday evening may look more like another temporary pause in a war that started long before Israel’s founding in 1948, and has never ended.”
As Tom Friedman pointed out, it is Trump’s moral indifference to the human rights transgressions of his partners in the peace plan that allows him to break through old paradigms.
That is the same moral indifference that will prevent him from ever getting a Nobel. You can’t get a medal for promoting democracy when you tried to overthrow the democracy you were running. He has shown utter disdain for our Constitution and the laws that have made us the greatest democracy in the world.
Trump has sparked danger in the streets in America.Credit: AP
Once in 2016, I asked him about the violence that was breaking out at his rallies. He said he thought it added some excitement to the proceedings.
Trump is constantly posting cruel, nasty images on Truth Social. He loves gladiatorial combat, the scenes of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers roughing up people, even if they have their American passports in their pockets.
What sort of person – much less a president – does not object to headlines like this in The Hill: “Top DHS Official Defends ICE Officer Who Shot Pastor With Pepper Ball”? The Rev David Black was protesting peacefully at an ICE facility in a Chicago suburb, hands out, offering to pray with officers, when an ICE officer on a roof shot him in the head with a pepper ball.
While Trump may have sparked dancing in the streets in the Middle East, he’s sparked danger in the streets in America. He is siccing American troops on blue cities, distorting the National Guard’s largely humanitarian mission and turning it into, as The New York Times’ John Ismay put it, “a partisan strike force at the whim of the president”.
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Trump expressed another chilling whim to the generals recently when he said he had told Pete Hegseth: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Even as he says he should have won the Nobel five times over for his work solving foreign conflicts, he is creating conflicts in America, concocting perilous crises in American cities. Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, the Republican chair of the National Governors Association, told the Times that the president was violating states’ rights: “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”
While he’s freeing hostages in Gaza, Trump is seizing some here. He’s forcing Pam Bondi to play the tortured servant Renfield to his dark, narcissistic Dracula. She is scurrying around eating insects, doing the president’s dirty work of indicting his foes and purging anyone who worked with them. The Department of Vengeance, nee Department of Justice, has indicted James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the attorney-general of New York, and more Trumped-up vindictive indictments are surely coming.
Richard Nixon had an enemies list, but he didn’t do much with it. He could only dream of doing the kind of stuff Trump has got away with.
Trump seems oblivious to the paradox of enforcing peace abroad and disrupting it badly at home, of soothing violence overseas and inflaming it here. While he’s rechristened the Pentagon the chesty “Department of War”, he’s bragging about forming a Board of Peace – with himself, of course, the chief peacenik – to oversee Gaza’s new governing body. The contradiction is hard to square. It’s not going to win America’s president a peace prize.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
