Everyone should read Phil Klein’s excellent post on President Trump’s Gaza bombshell. I would call it Trump’s harebrained scheme except it should be obvious by now to everyone, including our enemies, that Trump has decided to govern as a flood-the-zone provocateur. The art of the deal, evidently, is to be the behemoth who takes outrageous positions that cause his weaker targets to shake in their boots; the master’s genius is soon demonstrated when the targets move away from what we’re meant to see as their previously intractable positions.
Trump, to the contrary, is a poor negotiator because he’s easily seen through: his counterparts know this is theatrics, not strategy. Take his threats of trade war against Mexico and Canada. Once our neighbors readied retaliation that would have caused real harm, once markets duly groaned, the president beat a swift retreat with, of course, a farcical declaration of victory. (As Dominic Pino ably demonstrates, Mexico and Canada made no actual concessions. The bottles, instead, were dusted off so the same old wine could be sold to the ingenuous as something new and magnificent.)
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