Chinese President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump at the G7 summit, Osaka, Japan, June 2019
EA on International Media: Now The Hard Work Begins — Will There Be A Lasting Gaza Ceasefire?
EA-Times Radio VideoCast: Trump — When Wannabe Dictator and Economic Moron Intersect
I joined Times Radio’s Trump Report on Saturday for a 43-minute deep dive into more Trump Administration chaos, tantrums, and backroom dealing.
Host Maddie Hale and I begin with Donald Trump’s renewal of his trade war with China, threatening an additional 100% tariff after Beijing imposed controls on the export of rare earth minerals.
Will Trump dare to escalate the confrontation, given that Americans — including his voters — will be the first to pay the cost? Or will there be a repeat of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out)?
Using Trump’s tantrum that he was not given the Nobel Peace Prize — insulting the Nobel Committee and the recipient, Venezuelan rights activist Maria Corina Machado — we go beyond his forthcoming “victory lap” over the hostages-for-detainees exchange and immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
I detail the challenges of negotiating Israeli withdrawal, Hamas disarmament, arrangements for governance and security of Gaza, and the path to a State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel.
I go beyond a slip by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, announcing a Qatari training facility on a US military base in Idaho, to get to the important story. The Trump family’s pursuit of profits include a proposed $5.5 billion golf course and resort in the Gulf State and, more importantly, $1.5 billion of Qatari money behind the investment firm of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
That returns us to Gaza with the real story of “Trump the Peacemaker”: how Israel’s airstrike inside Qatar on September 9, trying to assassinate Hamas negotiators, turned Trump from a backer of Israeli mass killing in Gaza into a President putting pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
