“Morning Joe” analyzed Donald Trump’s ability to secure a cease-fire deal in the Israel-Hamas war on Tuesday, saying the president was probably only able to get the job done because people are afraid of him.
“To my mind, other presidents probably would not be feared as much as Donald Trump,” host Joe Scarborough said during the panel discussion. “As I looked at the assemblage up there, I did understand that a lot of that was going on because of people’s fear of Donald Trump.”
Scarborough continued, examining how world leaders were positioned next to Trump during the announcement of the deal.
“The old saying: ‘Better to be feared than loved’ — not something that I’ve always wanted to see in a leader,” Scarborough said. “But for the purpose of yesterday, where you saw [Turkish President Tayyip] Erdoğan meekly to his left and the Qatari leader meekly to his right, the shoe fit there, didn’t it?”
Washington Post associate editor David Ignatius agreed: “When Trump says, there’ll be hell to pay if he doesn’t get the deal he’s seeking, people tend to believe him, that he’s prepared to back that up.”
“And I think the key people working with him were far from democratic,” the journalist continued. “Qatar is not a democracy, he elaborately thanked the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim, as he did to Erdoğan, who’s been a tough, sometime Santi-democratic leader of Turkey. That was all put aside for the very practical, transactional help that those two leaders and others could give to Trump in getting to where he wanted to be.”
Watch the full “Morning Joe” segment in the video below:
Ignatius then explained that while many have started to celebrate the peace deal, this is merely just the first step in the overall resolution between Israel and Hamas.
“What we have is the first phase of what could be a comprehensible deal for peace in Gaza, leading the way to a real Israeli-Palestinian agreement and peace, but we don’t have that yet,” Ignatius explained. “What was implemented was Phase 1. Phase 2, which contains all the most difficult issues — the disarmament of Hamas, the establishment of government governance by technocratic Palestinians who can take power away from Hamas — that’s still to come. And there are lots of signs on the ground in the last day that that’s going to be difficult.”
On Monday, Hamas released all 20 of the remaining living hostages into Israeli custody as part of a cease-fire deal brokered between the U.S., Israel and Hamas.
The hostages were transferred from the Red Cross to the Israeli military on Monday before crossing the border between Gaza and Israel. In exchange, Israel released 250 Palestinian prisoners into Gaza and the West Bank, along with more than 1,700 Palestinians detained in Gaza since the war began following the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack. Hamas also said it would return the bodies of 28 deceased hostages to their families.
