Good morning! We have some unfinished business from last week: our mailbag column for paid subscribers!
This week, we’ll look at:
How much credit Donald Trump deserves for the Israel/Hamas ceasefire deal
Whether Trump needs congressional approval to bail out Argentina
The Supreme Court’s reasoning in the case that greenlit partisan gerrymandering
The real name of the Department of Defense/War
And more!
Let’s dive in…
Q: Is the Trump Middle East peace plan different from the one Biden proposed?
Q: The President wants to take credit for the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but what did he actually do? It’s not clear from ready news reports what role he played, let alone what he can take credit for.
Let’s answer the first question first, which will help us progress to the second.
In January 2025, shortly before leaving office, former President Biden — with assistance from now-President Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff — mediated a ceasefire plan between Israel and Hamas, which fell apart after about two months. The text of that deal is here.
Earlier this month, President Trump brokered a new ceasefire deal (which is now on the rocks, as we’ll discuss below), the text of which is here.
The broad strokes of the two proposals are the same: Israel releases Palestinian prisoners, Hamas releases Israeli hostages, Israel completes a phased withdrawal from Gaza, more humanitarian aid enters Gaza, both sides agree to halt attacks. The most significant difference is the timeline for the hostage releases: the Trump deal required that all the Israeli hostages be released in the very first phase of the agreement, while the Biden deal would have seen the hostages released over time (which meant, because the ceasefire fell apart, many of them remained in captivity).
The other big difference is that Trump’s deal goes into more detail about the future of Gaza (including the disarming of Hamas) — but I wouldn’t spend too much time analyzing that. It does not appear that Hamas signed onto those parts of the agreement; all of those details are still left to be negotiated.
To what degree should Trump receive credit for the October 2025 deal? From my vantage point, here were the factors that went into the latest ceasefire coming together: