Trump willed peace plan into being. Give the man his victory lap

Trump’s arrested psychological development was the base metal for alchemical transmutation into political gold

President Donald Trump set himself a grueling pace last weekend to ensure his fragile peace plan’s opening performance went off without a hitch. His mini-tour began with a twelve-hour flight to Israel, where he met with the hostage families and delivered a major address to the Knesset. This was followed by an air hop to another major address at a world leaders’ meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh. Factor in the usual schmoozing and glad-handing between formalities; it had to be a tiring day. Yet Trump looked as peppy at the end of his Middle East excursion as at the beginning.

Come to think of it, have you ever seen Trump when he didn’t look peppy? At 79, he defies conventional assumptions about health and aging. After a lifetime of cheeseburgers and Diet Coke and golf-cart “exercise,” Trump’s physician at Walter Reed National Military Center recently pronounced his health as “exceptional,” citing a cardiac age of 65.

Remember the 1988 movie “Big”? Actor Tom Hanks played a restive teenage boy who believes all his adolescent problems would disappear if he were an adult. He magically gets his wish for an adult body, but his mind and personality remain boyish. Subsequent experiences have him conflicted: as an adult, he has a fun job and a charming girlfriend, but adult life makes demands he struggles to navigate. At times, he yearns to return to childhood’s soothing, responsibility-free simplicities.

That’s Trump. Except for the part about being conflicted and yearning to escape responsibility. No matter how complex it gets, Trump’s “fun job” has him on a permanent high. Other oldies, like me, look in the mirror and see a memento mori. Trump looks in the mirror and sees the fresh-faced boy whose destiny it is to awe the world with his superhuman power and charisma, bending all other kingpins to his iron will. And behold: The fantasy has legs.

Trump’s haters are amazed and frustrated by this feat. It makes no sense. Every U.S. president since modern Israel’s national birth has toiled in the vineyards of Palestinian revanchism and produced mostly sour grapes. Trump’s wildly inflated ego and ridiculous personality should have proved anathema to success. Instead, here he is, “bestrid(ing) the narrow world like a Colossus,” as Shakespeare’s Cassius says with incredulity of Julius Caesar. Incredulity and envy: “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed/That he is grown so great?”

The “meat” Julius Caesar (also not a very nice man) fed upon was his unshakable belief that he was destined for greatness, combined with a demagogue’s instinct for crowd-pleasing buzzwords. I’m not arguing for Trump as the reincarnation of Caesar, only for what a demotically-attuned, bullish individual’s sense of destiny, aided by a political vacuum produced by “petty men” — in this case, Democrats in thrall to pernicious woke theories — can achieve.

What events of the past week in Israel and Egypt demonstrate is that Trump’s arrested psychological development was the base metal for alchemical transmutation into political gold. Children blurt out truths that adults have learned to suppress. That’s the lesson of the fable about the emperor’s new clothes, and the reason it is so famous. Children see what they see, unfiltered by abstract theories. They haven’t yet been schooled by charlatans into believing demonstrable falsehoods, and so they don’t feel constrained from stating the obvious.

Amongst other entrenched charlatan-sponsored harms that “adults” wouldn’t touch, but that boy-man Trump quickly mitigated or ended are: America’s catastrophically open border; the subjugation of women to a stupid, misogynistic theory in NCAA sport; divisive and corrosive DEI considerations in federal contracting; toleration of extreme antisemitism on university campuses; a reversal to seriously declining military recruitment; funding to Hamas-riddled UNRWA; and a crushing setback to Iran’s nuclear-weapons obsession, thus ending the Iran-Israel war, not to mention playing a substantial role in de-escalating or ending several other wars.

Finally, in last week’s ceremonially pledged 20-point Peace Plan, Trump basked in the glow of his crowning achievement — a politically isolated Hamas’s return of all the live Israeli hostages, managed with the cooperation of every major player in the region. There is good reason to hope that the Abraham Accords, Trump’s stellar first-term achievement, will expand and belie all the “adult” naysayers who insisted it couldn’t be done.

“This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East,” Trump told a rapturous Knesset. A fantasy? Too many obstacles? That’s what many prudent “adults” told Theodore Herzl, modern Zionism’s foremost prophet of the Jewish state. His response: “If you will it, it is no dream.”

Trump willed this Peace Plan into being. Where his detractors see childish delusions and vainglory, his supporters see mature vision and resolution. Whether his plan succeeds or — God forbid — fails, today we must give the boy-man his victory lap. He has earned it.