The book the two of you wrote is scathingly critical of the way U.S. presidents have approached deals, frameworks, negotiations before now. And one place where you end your analysis is by saying there has been an overreliance on technocratic rationality. And in this way, Trump seems to fit the kind of figure you are talking about better than the people who have come before him. He doesn’t care that much about either the Israelis or the Palestinians. He would like a Nobel Peace Prize of anything. He is not unwilling to use his power against either side. He is himself unpredictable. He is himself somewhat irrational. He is himself driven by emotion and intuition and willing to use leverage when he needs it. Yes, his attention span is certainly an issue here, but you could, I think, read your book and then look at that it was Trump who got this deal, not Joe Biden, and say, maybe Trump is the kind of figure you need to make progress. Yeah, I think what you said is absolutely right and captures what we say in the book and in some sense, and we even say it, President Trump, after years of faux outrage from Democratic presidents in particular, some genuine cynicism was a breath of fresh air, which is why a lot of Arabs welcomed his coming into office a second time, knowing as they well knew his bias towards Israel and everything he had done in his first term. And I think to add to your list of attributes, if that’s the word, of President Trump, he also is immune to the laws of American political gravity. I mean, we’ve seen it. He — who’s going to criticize him if he puts pressure on Israel or if he talks to Hamas? He sent Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to talk to them. He claimed that he spoke to them, which I doubt, but in any event, he could very well do it, because who’s going to criticize him? Not the Republican Party, because they are lockstep behind him and Democrats criticizing him from that he’s being too tough on Israel or too soft on the Palestinians — that wouldn’t fly, either. So he really has the ability to do things that others wouldn’t. He’s a politician of intuition. Now, having said all that, I wish that all those unconventional, unorthodox attributes were married to something more than narcissism and ego. And I think that’s where we may run into a much bigger problem, because with President Trump, who knows what tomorrow will bring, but the break he represents from the past is something that was needed. I’m not sure that he’s the break I would have chosen if I’d had my druthers.
