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President Trump issues plenty of threats.
Sometimes they get results, sometimes they don’t.
And sometimes it’s just bluster. Especially if it’s an online posting, such as saying that Chicago’s mayor and Illinois’ governor should go to jail for resisting him on dispatching troops to the Windy City.
But his relentless personality – backed by the world’s most powerful military – can be overpowering.
TRUMP NOMINATED FOR NOBEL PEACE PRIZE OVER ISRAEL-HAMAS CEASEFIRE DEAL
President Trump’s recent headway on Middle East peace has been remarkable – though it’s been marred at the last second with echoes of the Letitia James prosecution. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
It’s hard to overstate what a remarkable achievement Trump is in the process of assembling by getting Israel and Hamas to end their brutal and bloody two-year-old war.
It’s fair to say no other president could have pulled this off. Joe Biden certainly couldn’t. In fact, not since Jimmy Carter staged the marathon Camp David talks with Anwar Sadar and Menachem Begin has a president brokered peace between the Israelis and one of their Arab enemies.
Trump himself engineered the Abraham Accords, with help from Jared Kushner, joined by the U.A.E. and Bahrain, in his first term, and later by Sudan and Morocco. That gave him the experience to tackle this immensely tougher challenge and spur more Nobel Peace Prize speculation.
Trump had to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting his peace deal. (Chen Mengtong/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
Now some quick caveats are in order. The president says he expects the remaining 20 hostages to be returned Monday or Tuesday, but the Hamas terrorists could come up with new objections that derail the train.
Reporters were asking about Phase 2, which would include returning the bodies of deceased hostages, but the president wisely deflected those questions.
So no popping of champagne corks quite yet.
EXCLUSIVE: ISRAELI AMBASSADOR SAYS NO PEACE IN GAZA UNLESS HAMAS HANDS OVER ALL 48 HOSTAGES, DISARMS
Presumably, it was these reservations that prompted anchors and correspondents on the air to appear rather sober-faced as they covered the latest developments. But I think it was more than that.
Some of these journalists are not exactly supportive of Trump. And so it’s not easy for them to shower him with credit. They say the right words – tremendous accomplishment and so on – but the body language sends a different message.
Look, Israel has been in a state of war, or cold war, with the surrounding countries since its founding in 1948.
And in a broader sense, the Jews and the Arabs have had hostile relations for many centuries. It’s in the Bible, the plea to Pharaoh to “let my people go.”
Now, there remain crucial unanswered questions about who will rule Gaza, most of it reduced to rubble, in the future. Israel was subject to a brutal massacre on Oct. 7, but it has also found itself increasingly isolated as more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed. Many Israelis, and American Jews, believe Bibi Netanyahu let the war drag on too long to protect his political standing.
Trump had to pressure Bibi into accepting his peace deal, essentially by threatening to have the U.S. walk away.
Now Hamas is essentially being asked to surrender by turning in its weapons. Trump says he will join with other countries in a peace council to prevent the resumption of war. But those details remain murky, beyond the fact that the terrorists will no longer be in charge, as they have been since Israel voluntarily withdrew from the Gaza Strip nearly two decades ago.
GRAND JURY INDICTS NY AG LETITIA JAMES ON BANK FRAUD CHARGES IN VIRGINIA FEDERAL COURT
So just as the president was basking in some well-deserved praise for essentially remaking the Middle East, there was a new development.
A grand jury indicted Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, for mortgage fraud.
This, in a nutshell, underscores the duality of the Trump presidency.
It seems like a petty move, and in a video, James said “we will fight these baseless charges aggressively.”
A grand jury indicted New York State Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud – in essence, underscoring the duality of Trump. (Jim Franco/Albany Times Union via Getty Images)
As with the recent indictment of James Comey, the indictment was returned only because Trump replaced his own U.S. attorney in Virginia’s eastern district with White House aide and loyalist Lindsey Halligan, who has no prosecution experience.
Trump told his AG, Pam Bondi, in a memo that James, like Comey, was “guilty as hell.” The Wall Street Journal says that “Pam” memo was intended to be secret.
Career prosecutors had decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge James, who brought a civil suit against candidate Trump on real estate inflation that produced a fine which grew to half a billion dollars – so outrageous that an appellate court tossed it out. James also won her job by promising to go after Trump, calling him an “illegitimate” president.
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James has owned a home in Brooklyn for decades, and two years ago she bought a house in Norfolk, Va. with her niece.
The career prosecutors found little evidence that James was dishonest in completing the paperwork.
The media spotlight immediately shifted from Trump the global peacemaker to Trump the crusader who is doggedly pursuing a campaign of retribution against his enemies.
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At the very moment he was drawing praise from around the world, Trump stepped on his own story.
