Trump Deserves Most Credit For Peace Agreement
By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on the day this column will be published.
It is a very positive and hopeful sign that even before taking office, he took action as president-elect to help bring about a peace agreement for the poor people of Gaza.
The Times of Israel is one of the leading publications in that country. On January 15, the situation was summed up in this way: “A ‘tense’ weekend meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and incoming Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff led to a breakthrough in the hostage negotiations, with the top aide to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump doing more to sway the premier in a single sit-down than outgoing President Joe Biden did all year, two Arab officials told the Times of Israel on Tuesday.”
Witkoff had been sent to the region by Trump the week before to participate in the negotiations to “try to secure a deal before Trump’s January 20 inauguration.”
He then flew to Israel on Saturday, Jan. 9 to meet with Netanyahu in his Jerusalem office where Witkoff urged him “to accept key compromises necessary for an agreement.”
The key to finally reaching this temporary (hopefully permanent) settlement was something Trump posted on his personal platform, Truth Social, on Wednesday, January 6. This post really shook the Israeli government to the core.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Trump “shared a video of Jewish-American economist Jeffrey Sachs wherein Sachs called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ‘a dark son of a b****’ and of dragging the U.S. into wars in the Middle East.”
The video Trump shared came from a speech Sachs gave at Cambridge University in England. During a question-and-answer session, Sachs said the U.S. Deep State “wanted war all the time” and had “to scare the s*** out of the American people” to get those wars.
Sachs then added that “the 2003 Iraq invasion was a ‘phony war’ that came from Netanyahu, actually.”
Regular readers of my column will know that I quoted Sachs in my column last week about Netanyahu’s violent nature, and in my column on Dec. 2, I mentioned a Nov. 21 podcast where Sachs said that Netanyahu was the “lead cheerleader for the Iraq War.”
In 2016, I became one of the earliest members of Congress to endorse Trump for president. I did this because I was convinced he was the least hawkish of all the Republicans running for president that year (after Sen. Rand Paul had dropped out).
I was included in a small group that consisted of five members from the House and one member from the Senate who were invited to hear Trump’s first major foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on April 27, 2016.
Trump has always been very kind to me, even after I left office. He gave me one of his 15 non-family tickets to the 2020 presidential debate (tickets were limited because of Covid), and he invited Vickie and me to have dinner with him in Nashville a year and a half ago. At another Nashville event, he introduced me as a “great friend.”
I have said and written that Trump has said and done things that even his strongest supporters wish he had not said or done. And I know, too, that even husbands and wives and best friends sometimes disagree. I will not agree with everything Trump will do over these next four years.
But at a time when people are fleeing more than 150 countries trying to escape socialist governments that have destroyed their economies, I am relieved that we did not elect the socialist Kamala Harris as our president.
And because of Trump’s statements through the years about having an American-First foreign policy, I am very hopeful that he will be a very anti-war, peace president like Eisenhower was.
Trump was against our war in Iraq, he has raised concerns about NATO, and he has said the war in Ukraine should have been worked out before it ever even started.
Unfortunately, 82 people were killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza on the day this latest agreement was reached. The ceasefire is supposed to last for 42 days. I hope Israel will not be so eager to go to war after that.
No one can predict the future, but Trump is off to a very good start with this peace agreement. Now, I hope and believe he will stop pouring more billions down the drain in Ukraine.
