Aaron David Miller

But staying in power and the vulnerabilities and risks to a leader.

He's the longest governing prime minister in history of the state of Israel.

He believes he is indispensable.

I'm sure they did.

In fact, if Trump cared about any part of the Middle East, the Gulf –

was the thing, partly for the reasons that you say, the seamless lack of boundaries between what constitutes Trump's business interests and the American national interests.

has long been erased.

The Abraham Accords, his signal achievement, don't want to take anything away from that.

In Trump 1.0, he relishes authoritarians that don't have democratic constraints.

He loves to be flattered.

No, the Gulf is the thing for him.

And cultivating those relationships, which both Witkoff and particularly Jared Kushner have done, particularly the Emiratis and the Saudis,

Basically, yes, that certainly contributed to the Arab dimension of Trump's transactional nature.

It's the Israeli dimension, though, to me, that is key.

And what Trump was able to do and what made his transaction, in my judgment, possible in the one area that made this deal possible, which was his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu,

was two things which have impeded and constrained American presidents, almost all of them, from expanding the margin of pressure that they're prepared to place on an Israeli prime minister.

One is the emotional identification.

Trump, unlike Bill Clinton, who wrote in his memoir, I loved Rabin as I love no man.

Clinton was in love, literally, with the idea of Israel, the people of Israel, the security of Israel.

Joe Biden, I listened to him three days after October 7th talk about the, quote, black hole of loss, unquote, and the savagery of what occurred on October 7th and conflate that almost certainly with the tragedy of