Guessing Donald Trump: What he means and what he wants

We’re in the midst of a general return to something that’s going to happen every now and then for the next four years: endless, usually fruitless guessing as to what’s ‘really’ going on in Donald Trump’s mind.

Naturally and understandably, Israel has spent the last few days trying to understand what he means when he promises ‘hell’ to Hamas. The politicians, usually on the right, hope that the president-elect will carry out with his own hands the vision of an empty northern Gaza. Amit Segal, political commentator Rav Anfin on Channel 12, even passed this prescription on to Trump through an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Segal’s colleagues cast chills on his hopes. In the last three days they reported on messages, coming from Trump’s circles, to the effect: The next president does not want escalations, wars and visions. He wants peace, because he has more important things to do, such as mass deportation of immigrants, rapid acceleration of oil and gas drilling, imposing tariffs on every country that has ever pissed him off (and which country has never pissed him off), and settling accounts with his opponents, critics and persecutors from home Indeed, there are not enough hours in the day to accomplish all this, even for an old man, who tends to settle for four or five hours of sleep a night.

This column has also been dealing with Trump guesses for many months. We came back and wrote here long before his victory, because it’s better that no one trusts Trump’s finger. She will not pull the trigger and will not pull the trigger. Although he is not a pacifist, he hates wars. In the American context, he hates hawks even, or especially, when they come from the right.

“Destroy North Korea”

So what can we rely on when we come to guess? First of all about precedents. Like, for example, the hate-for-love affair between Trump and the crazy dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un. At the end of August 2017, Kim conducted a spectacular test of ballistic missiles. He is seen sitting at a desk, a broad smile on his face, generals standing around him, and missiles rising not far away. Those missiles could carry nuclear warheads.

Trump was going to give a speech at the UN General Assembly less than three weeks later. His anger burned in him to corrupt. In his speech, he insulted the “Little Rocket Man” (like the name of Elton John’s famous song), who is at the head of a “despicable regime”. Trump declared that the US would not allow the “criminal gang” to harm its security, and he was ready to “destroy North Korea” if it carried out its plan to arm itself with weapons ballistic He hopes things don’t come to that, he said.

And indeed, things did not come to that. Not even five months had passed since Trump’s rambling speech, and the two, he and Kim, met face to face in Singapore. Some time later, Trump even symbolically crossed the 38th parallel, which separates the two parts of Korea, stood on the North’s soil, and warmly shook the hand of the detestable and criminal dictator of September.

Later Trump said that he had a cordial correspondence with Kim, and received a “love letter” from him, in these words. Although personal relations cooled, because Kim refused to dismantle his nuclear weapons. But Trump did not return to the rhetoric of the first months of his presidency. The main bad things he said about Korea concerned the “good spoons” of Democratic Korea, the one we call South Korea, an ally of the US. He complained that it was taking advantage of America and not paying enough for its defense.

What does the Kim affair teach us? First of all, that Trump’s bark is stronger than his bite. He uses the microphone to threaten, not to declare war. He is “the master of the deal,” and five months after threatening to “destroy North Korea,” he advised Kim to turn Pyongyang’s coast into a tourist riviera.

“Noble, Noble”

In his own eyes, he is the champion of pragmatism, a man who takes advantage of opportunities to do business. He copies this pragmatism to foreign policy as well. Is he doing this to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, as they wrote in recent days, also in Globes? Maybe, who knows. Such an ambition was also attributed to Ronald Reagan, when the dramatic reconciliation process with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union began, 40 years ago. The hawkish, anti-communist Cold War right condemned his innocence. They were wrong, and Reagan was right. But he did not receive the Nobel Prize.

Trump has spoken publicly about the Nobel Prize. In April 2018, after returning from his meeting with Kim in Singapore, he spoke at a rally in Michigan. The audience erupted in completely spontaneous chants, “Nobel, Nobel”. Trump stepped back from the microphone, smiled like a shy boy, and said “Thank you, that’s nice of you.”

A few days later he announced in the Oval Office that he deserved the Nobel Prize “for many things”, but it would not be awarded to him. A sure way to his heart was a public call from a foreign leader, such as the Prime Minister of Japan or the President of South Korea – to give him the award. He thanked them publicly, mentioned indignantly that Barack Obama actually received it, and complained that he certainly wouldn’t.

It’s almost strange that a man so scornful of global institutions, and so easy on the minds of foreigners, pays so much attention to the opinion of the Norwegian parliament, the one that awards the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Abdul” at Camp David

Nevertheless, there is an exaggeration in the tendency to attribute any peace initiative of his, or any avoidance of military action, to the pursuit of honor. He is definitely a narcissist, but that doesn’t mean that the only profit he gets from peace is a Nobel Prize. He has been thinking for decades that it is not in the interest of the US to fight other people’s wars overseas.

He is indeed the man who ordered the elimination of Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, and to hunt down and kill al-Baghdadi, the “replacer of the believers” of ISIS, in Syria. But he is also the one who imposed an annihilation agreement on the US’s allies in Afghanistan, and invited the leader of the Taliban (whom he called “Abdul”) to Camp David. Only the plea of ​​his advisers spared this disgrace, in September 2020, close to the 19th anniversary of the Al Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

The difference between 2020 and 2025 is that now Trump surrounds himself with people who say the same, or with people who agree with him without reservation. If he thinks he has a deal, or a Nobel Prize, or is preventing a war, you better believe he’ll get even Mohammed Sinwar out of his lair, if not maybe fly him to Camp David.

But, as we warned above, these are just guesses. And we will multiply them here to zero.

Previous lists in the blog and in Yoav Karni. Tweets (in English) on Twitter.