“The
Trump Effect”: On Deal-Making and Credit-Claiming in Trump 2.0
The
once and future President is back to wielding leverage like a club, in the
Middle East and on Capitol Hill.
January
16, 2025
The long-awaited, painstakingly negotiated deal for a hostage swap and ceasefire in the war
between Israel and Hamas had not even been formally announced, on Wednesday,
when Donald Trump claimed credit for it. “This EPIC ceasefire agreement could
have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November,” the once
and future President declared on social media. “We have achieved so much
without even being in the White House.” Minutes later, Trump’s incoming
national-security adviser, Mike Waltz, seized on the boss’s statement in his
own social-media post: it was, he said, proof of “The Trump Effect.” In an
appearance on Fox News, Waltz elaborated, attributing the breakthrough to
Trump’s repeated threats of “HELL TO PAY” if Hamas did not agree to release the
hostages before he returned to office. “They believed President Trump when he
said there would be all hell to pay, and any deal that was on the table would
only get worse once he was in office.”
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.” One of the loudest
complaints about Turner among the MAGA faithful
has been his support for Ukraine in its war against Russia—and his public
criticism of a faction within his own party that he called pro-Russia. Johnson
has the most tenuous hold possible on his Speakership, which gives Trump
incredible leverage over him. How telling that Turner’s head is what Trump
apparently chose to ask for.
Yet the ouster of Turner could come
with adverse consequences, too. Some of it is simple political math: in the
House, Johnson’s margin of control is so thin that he can little afford to lose
a vote on anything. What if Turner quits voting for the Party line? Or quits
Congress outright? More substantively, Turner is far from the only Republican
member of Congress who remains committed to Ukraine’s defense—a reminder that
the G.O.P. is deeply divided over many of Trump’s signature policy issues. On
China, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, used his
confirmation hearing on Wednesday to stress that China remains an almost
existential-level threat to the United States; in 2022, he was one of the
leading senators to introduce legislation calling for the Chinese-owned app
TikTok to be banned from the U.S. Rubio and other China hawks in the
Administration, though, will have to combat Trump’s own instincts for
accommodation—symbolized by Trump’s election-season flip-flop from supporting a
TikTok ban to seeking to halt it. On Wednesday, after Rubio’s confirmation
hearing, the Times reported that Trump had invited TikTok’s
C.E.O. to sit as an honored guest at his upcoming Inauguration.
Even the Israel ceasefire deal that
Trump was so eager to tout this week is not the uncomplicated political win he
would like it to be. In Washington, Senator Tom Cotton blamed “lame duck” Biden
for trying to “cram down a bad deal on Israel”—right around the same time that
Trump was taking credit for it. Cotton is a studiously loyal Trump acolyte,
which makes his comment so revealing. Trump, in the end, has never fully
embraced many of the ideological causes that motivate many of his backers in
Congress, whether it’s supporting Israel as an article of faith or wanting to
ban abortion nationwide; his ideology is the ideology of racking up wins for
himself. There’s also the question of what, for Trump, actually constitutes a
win: Let’s not forget all the times in the first Trump Administration that the
President announced some sweeping, world-historic deal only to see it fail to
materialize. Remember him tweeting, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from
North Korea,” after his hype-filled Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un in 2018?
“The Trump Effect” is a great tagline
for an incoming Administration whose leader is perhaps the biggest braggart
ever to serve as President of the United States. But remember this as Trump
returns to the White House a few days from now: his bottomless desire for
credit means there is always the chance he’ll end up serving someone else’s
bottom line. ♦
