This article analyzes the Trump Effect, examining how former President Trump leverages his political influence to pressure both foreign leaders and members of his own party. It highlights Trump's role in the recent hostage deal between the US and Iran, demonstrating how he exerted pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and utilized his allies, including Steve Witkoff and Elon Musk, to achieve his goals. The article further explores Trump's influence on Republican senators, citing examples of how they readily accepted the excuses of his nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, and succumbed to his demands for fealty. It concludes by showcasing Trump's ability to wield power through intimidation, exemplified by his sudden dismissal of the House Intelligence Committee chairman.
There was, of course, more than a bit of Trumpian bluster to it all, and not just because Trump and Waltz failed to mention Joe Biden, who had publicly outlined the deal’s terms back in May and who had spent the months since lobbying to make it happen.
Waltz could barely contain his glee at the idea that there might soon be split-screen images of American and Israeli hostages being reunited with their families as Trump is being inaugurated, on Monday—an explicit echo of the dramatic scene from 1981, when the modern G.O.P.’s hero, Ronald Reagan, was sworn into office on the same day that Iran finally released the American hostages whose long captivity had helped seal Jimmy Carter’s electoral defeat. The prospect of a “Reagan moment,” as Waltz put it, was no doubt a big part of the deal’s appeal for Trump, who invariably speaks of his victories in sweeping historic terms. To the extent that the Trump Effect was real—and, in my view, it absolutely was—the warring party most subject to Trump’s threats was not Hamas but Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Over the weekend, Trump had dispatched his new envoy for the Middle East, his billionaire friend and golf partner Steve Witkoff, to personally pressure Netanyahu into accepting the deal—over the objections of Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition partners—and Witkoff has been working side by side this week with Biden’s lead negotiator, Brett McGurk, in the marathon sessions that led up to the announcement. On Thursday, I spoke with a source who has been closely involved in the hostage talks. “I give a lot of credit to Trump and his people, because they’re the ones putting the hammer on Bibi on this,” he told me. “The thing that pushed Bibi over the threshold of agreeing to coöperate was actually Trump and his people sending very clear messages that that’s the expectation of the incoming President and that there will be consequences if Israel fails to reach a deal.” The Trump Effect in the Middle East, in other words, is not that dissimilar to the Trump Effect we’ve seen here in Washington, where Trump has spent years demonstrating what political leverage can produce in the hands of someone willing to wield it like a club. All week on Capitol Hill, Republican members of Congress have been giving a master class in what this means in practice. On Tuesday, at a hearing for Trump’s embattled nominee for Secretary of Defense, the longtime Fox News host Pete Hegseth, G.O.P. senators who had initially voiced concerns about Hegseth’s past misbehavior were embarrassingly eager to accept his excuses for it. When Hegseth promised to abandon views that he has promoted for years, such as rejecting combat roles for women in the military, his testimony sounded about as credible as all those conservative Supreme Court appointees who claimed they were open-minded about Roe v. Wade only to win confirmation and swiftly vote to overturn it. But the Republican senators accepted Hegseth’s statements anyway, with a credulousness whose cringey-ness seemed to be the point: they have learned by now that Trump demands not just fealty but humiliating public displays of it. Soon after the hearing, Joni Ernst, the Republican senator from Iowa, announced that she would vote to confirm Hegseth—Ernst who, back in November, made the mistake of loudly touting her skepticism, as a combat veteran and a survivor of sexual assault, about a nominee accused of rape who was described by his own mother, in 2018, as a man who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego.” Was it really just Hegseth’s outraged denials and the fact that his mother later recanted her words that proved so persuasive to Ernst? A month ago, Hegseth and several other of Trump’s nominees, including his Russia-promoting choice for director of National Intelligence, his vaccine-skeptic choice for Health and Human Services Secretary, and his conspiracy-theorizing choice for F.B.I. director, appeared to face at least the possibility of tough confirmation battles. But now, amid an intense pressure campaign waged in public and private by Trump and his allies—including Elon Musk vowing to finance primary challenges against Republicans who don’t go along with Trump’s nominees—it’s likely that all of them will get through. Bullying, accompanied by threats from the world’s richest man, is the Trump Effect in unvarnished form. Another striking example of Trump as a politician whose default setting is to lean hardest on his own conservative allies—whether Netanyahu abroad or Republicans at home—came just hours after he claimed credit for the ceasefire in the Middle East. In a move that shocked and surprised many Republican members, House Speaker Mike Johnson fired the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Ohio Republican Mike Turner. Turner swiftly disclosed to CBS News’ Margaret Brennan the rationale that he had heard from Johnson: “concerns from Mar-a-Lago,” he said.
Trump Effect Middle East Politics Republican Party Intimidation Pressure Hostage Deal Mike Turner Pete Hegseth Benjamin Netanyahu
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