How Donald Trump can be a winner

Has a president ever come to power with so many waiting on his next move? Some are scared, some are excited, some are amused and all are fastening their seat belts for what might be coming from Donald J. Trump.

The ceasefire deal between the Israeli government and what’s left of the Hamas movement in Gaza speaks volumes about Trump’s use of rather old-fashioned muscle. It offers a glimpse of how a maverick returning to power after four years in the wilderness may finally have learned some lessons about exercising that power.

It’s no secret, on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that Trump played a role in the deal that hopefully sees hostages held by Hamas for 15 months exchanged for hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jails, and promises a halt to the daily litany of death and destruction in Gaza. 

The painstaking work of President Biden’s negotiating team paved the way, for sure. But even allowing for Trump’s characteristic self-glorification (“all down to my historic victory in November, signalling to the world my intent to make peace,” he said), you hear confirmation of the Trump deal-making at work. Personal, rambunctious, defying the protocol of a leader waiting to take power, but perhaps effective.

Just days before taking office, the President-elect sent Steve Witkoff, his erstwhile golf buddy, and now his Middle East envoy, to the region to make it abundantly clear that Trump not just wanted a deal, but was insisting on one. First in Qatar, with mediators who had been at this for months with Biden’s CIA Director Bill Burns, then with the Israeli leadership in Jerusalem, the message from the leader supposedly writing his Inaugural address in Florida was stark. In the words of one Trump loyalist : “Cut the crap, do the deal.”

Some of my old Mideast colleagues scoffed at the notion of Witkoff, real estate billionaire and Trump chum, staring down Netanyahu, even demanding a face-to-face meeting with him on Shabat, the Jewish sabbath, after months when the Israeli leader had rejected similar deals. Now Israeli sources tell you: “basically Trump, via his envoy, said enough already! We have other fish to fry. Netanyahu came to understand that he lost Trump if he defied him.”

The question, of course, is whether Trump will replay his own history in the Oval Office, lose focus, forget what he did yesterday, listen to the next person he speaks to about tomorrow, and so squander what represents an extraordinary opportunity to re-cast himself as a peacemaker.

Certainly, some of Trump’s political posturing in this countdown to his return to the Oval Office has been disturbing. Rumblings about taking Greenland had the Danish Government in emergency mode, not to mention the wider European community. Using “force” to take back the Panama Canal, so uniting left and right in Latin America to defend a fellow Latino, again smacked of power without thought of consequences. Canada, too, was treated to Trumpian dreams of being absorbed into his New America, America Great Again. 

Yet what strikes me, despite everything, is the extraordinary opportunity Trump has to use the world’s unparalleled attention his leadership not to destabilise but to act — at a moment of such conflict not just in the Middle East, but in Ukraine and Africa (think Sudan, where war and famine now combine to kill on a terrifying scale, even by the standards of Ukraine and Gaza).

… he understands the instruments of power, and his real clout, in a way he simply didn’t eight years ago

Despite his rambling monologues, we have some cause to hope that the backstory of Trump’s preparation for a second term suggests the man himself has learned from the chaotic, at times incoherent days in the Oval Office before. Certainly, he understands the instruments of power, and his real clout, in a way he simply didn’t eight years ago. Likewise, as I have argued in these pages, the global landscape cries out for Washington’s engagement, however flawed the new leader in charge of that conversation.

Then let’s consider the groundwork being laid by a Trump team that has casually rejected the long tradition of discreet avoidance of any show of muscling in on an incumbent. As Joe Biden painfully wound up his final days in office, Trump made his move in the Middle East over the Gaza war. But he didn’t stop there. From Beijing, where he invited supreme leader Xi Jinping to his inauguration (Xi declined that historic invite, but is sending his right-hand man), to Moscow and beyond, Trump is on the march.

Ahead, in a matter of days, may come a conversation with Vladimir Putin — the first between a US President and the Russian leader since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a war shortly about to enter its third year. Western sceptics fear that Trump will offer Putin (“my good friend,” Donald once said) the slice of Ukraine he now controls and tell President Zelensky to swallow hard and take it, so keeping “America First” at the heart of his mission and singing the song of his voters.

It sounds like the Trump of his first round in office — short-sighted, bereft of any vision, focussed largely on how this or that issue played to his base, listening to sycophants such as his new right-hand mate Elon Musk. We should be ready for a replay of the man-child in the White House — but maybe, just maybe, the deal in the Middle East, as well as the wish for dialogue with supposed enemies in Beijing and Moscow, hints at a leader who is coming to understand that age-old maxim that forgetting your history means being condemned to repeat it. And lest we forget, Trump patently dreads ever being cast as a loser.