This Deal Is Trump's--It Has Always Been Trump's

Hi All,

There is so much news swirling around today that this will be a short update. I am also writing an article on what is happening for The Atlantic, which should be out later today or tomorrow. When that appears I will send out a longer piece for paying subscribers with commentary and a copy of a first draft.

However I think it is important to make one thing entirely clear, after all the frenzied excitement and desperate attempts yesterday in some quarters to rewrite history. This “deal” that has been formally approved by the United States Government is not some rogue operation of Steve Witkoff or even Jared Kushner. It is a clear expression of the beliefs, indeed hopes, of Donald Trump. In that sense alone, it represents a very important moment and it is an opportunity to cut through all the distracting cacophony of the last few days.

When the deal was first announced, many voices, including prominent ones in the media, instantly started speculating that this was an example of Steve Witkoff freelancing with the Russians. Shashank Joshi, the well known defense correspondent of The Economist, was a leading voice spreading these rumors (though he was certainly not alone).

An even more extreme example of this is the NY Post’s correspondent, Caitlin Doornbos, who has often tried to portray Trump as being pro-Ukraine (when he is not), immediately labelling this deal not as Trump’s, but as Witkoff’s.

There were many, many others.

It was, perhaps, a comforting yarn for the media to spread, but after a while it was shown to be a total mirage. Soon stories, backed with White House sources, started to appear from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal, which made it perfectly clear that Trump not only knew about this deal, but had formally agreed to it days earlier.

Btw, the timing is interesting, seems that Trump was approving this plan almost at exactly the same time that he was pretending to support a vote on Graham-Blumenthal. In other words, Trump was actively part of a deception operation.

And then all the media voices that were trying to say that this was Witkoff and not Trump, just went silent.

It is important that people understand that this deal is Trump’s because of one thing. We now have evidence of