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In the decade since Donald Trump first descended the escalator, a peculiar new kind of “journalism” has evolved in Washington, one that has manifested again and again. Call it the Trump Deputy Takedown Op.
The Takedown Op is a manifestation of Donald Trump’s unconventional and experimental leadership style. The president likes to staff his campaigns, his administrations, and his roster of informal advisors with people who have wildly different policy views and goals. As long as these underlings are personally loyal to Trump and follow his decisions, they will be tolerated. But often, this leads to many internal campaigns to topple those favored by the president so a new man holding different priorities can be elevated in his place. And over and over, these internal campaigns are deliberately spilled out into the pages of America’s news outlets.
And so it is now with Donald Trump’s upstart chief diplomat, Steve Witkoff. Almost overnight and out of nowhere, Witkoff has become a star of the second Trump administration, the man who broke Foggy Bottom’s stranglehold on American diplomacy and showed that radical new approaches could be attempted and, more importantly, get results.
And so now, the attempt to unseat Witkoff is underway.
President Trump shouldn’t fall for it. Washington is attacking Witkoff because he brings a new style of diplomacy that old D.C. is simply not ready for—specifically, one that cares about speed, forthrightness, and results instead of appearances, deceit, and failure.
Witkoff, a real estate lawyer turned billionaire investor, has been friends with Donald Trump since the 1980s. Other than a minor advisory post during Covid, Witkoff sat out the first Trump administration, but he abruptly rose to prominence before the second even began when president-elect Trump named him his special envoy to the Middle East.
Witkoff brought no diplomatic experience at all—but he instead brought a lifetime of work in President Trump’s own favorite field of making business deals.
Even critics of the Trump Administration had to sit and marvel at the speed with which Witkoff brought about a ceasefire in the Israel/Gaza fight.
Last Friday evening, Steven Witkoff, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, called from Qatar to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aides that he would be coming to Israel the following afternoon. The aides politely explained that was in the middle of the Sabbath but that the prime minister would gladly meet him Saturday night.
Witkoff’s blunt reaction took them by surprise. He explained to them in salty English that Shabbat was of no interest to him. His message was loud and clear. Thus in an unusual departure from official practice, the prime minister showed up at his office for an official meeting with Witkoff, who then returned to Qatar to seal the deal.
The fact that the ceasefire broke down a few months later in no way nullifies what an accomplishment it was. Thanks to the deal, dozens of Hamas-held hostages were freed, including two American citizens. It was a success that the floundering Biden Administration failed to achieve for a whole year beforehand.
To get a sense of Witkoff’s personality and diplomatic approach, it’s worth watching some of his 90-minute interview in March with Tucker Carlson.
Throughout the interview, Witkoff shows a welcome awareness of the absurdities often pushed by America’s “intelligence experts.”
STEVE WITKOFF: Well, I think it’s a combination of a posture and a pose and a combination of also being simplistic. I think there’s this, you know, this sort of notion of we’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill, the Russians are gonna march across Europe. I think that’s preposterous. By the way, we have something called NATO that we did not have in World War II.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?
STEVE WITKOFF: 100% not.
The notion that Russia, which has struggled mightily to grind down a neighboring country that is both smaller and much poorer than it, desires a general war against all of NATO is an absurdity, yet incredibly popular among delusional “experts” on both sides of the Atlantic. Senior German politicians talk about it. Democratic presidential candidates predict invasions of Poland. Compared to this tripe, Witkoff’s realism is badly needed. Witkoff also demonstrated another welcome display of realism moments later:
STEVE WITKOFF: You know, someone said to me that someone—I was talking to someone in the administration. They said, well, you got to watch it, because [Putin is] an ex-KGB guy. So I said, okay, what’s the inference? Well, he’s an ex-KGB guy. He could be looking to manipulate you. … And I said, look, here’s how I see it. In the old days, the only people who went into the KGB were the smartest people in the nation. That’s who went into the KGB. He’s a super smart guy. Okay. You don’t want to give him the credit for it. That’s okay. I give him the credit for it.
Washington is full of people who assign mystical import to Putin working for the KGB more than three decades ago, as though it gives him powers of mind control or other magic. No doubt, for people who themselves have spent time in the CIA or other intel agencies, it’s a way of indirectly flattering their own prowess. But Witkoff cuts through the nonsense: Putin’s KGB experience means he’s smart and will do smart things, and that’s about it. If only we could make the same assumptions about our own intelligence agencies!
Following Witkoff’s early success, Trump soon assigned him to leading roles in seeking both a Russia/Ukraine peace and a long-term deal with Iran. Last week, the howling ramped up with a focused hit piece published in a generally pro-Trump news outlet, the New York Post.
Uh-oh! Trump insiders are upset about the man Trump has leading his negotiations. Aren’t you going to listen to the insiders? And what about our allies?
“Anybody engaging in these kinds of talks with Putin would benefit from having experienced Russia hands on his or her team and bringing them along to meetings with the Kremlin,” John Hardie, director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Russia program, said of Witkoff’s move.
A member of Trump’s first administration was more succinct.
“Nice guy, but a bumbling f–king idiot,” this person said of Witkoff. “He should not be doing this alone.”
Here we see the takedown operation in action: An anonymous figure adjacent to Trump World, endorsing the statement of a think-tank apparatchik, with all their takes aggregated and put out by a nominally neutral journalist in order to generate a narrative.
In fact, reading the entire Post article closely, one can ascertain the combined facts of the story:
- Witkoff sometimes meets Putin face-to-face without handlers, a break from prior “procedure.”
- Someone from a stridently anti-Russia think tank wants “Russia hands” to be there.
- Someone in the Trump admin thinks Witkoff is dumb.
- An Israeli thinks it is too hard for Witkoff to negotiate with Russia and Iran at the same time.
- Michael McFaul, a deranged lunatic, thinks that Witkoff is a “mailman for Putin” who does his bidding.
- A think-tank guy says that Witkoff talking with Iran is preventing a war from breaking out, and this is somehow bad.
And that’s it. There are no actual examples of Witkoff bungling a single fact or a single diplomatic exchange. It’s all distant resentment and anonymous, unprovable sniping.
Witkoff’s anonymous haters are like the Wizard of Oz in the old film: an imposing and intimidating facade that hides a pathetic reality. Because for all the whining of experts, what do they have to brag about in recent history? Virtually nothing. The notion that D.C.’s “experts” have any grounds to bash Trump diplomacy is a farce, and nowhere is this record of failure more clear than with Russia.
By all rights, Russia today ought to be a major American ally. At the end of the Cold War, it voluntarily and peacefully relinquished its empire, abandoned communism, and pivoted toward market-based economics and elected government. Pro-Western sentiment among ordinary people was high. The opportunity was there to completely transform Russia from a longtime foe into a durable friend. Instead, Washington chose just about the worst possible course. While America showered aid and privileges on Russia’s old Eastern bloc satellites like Poland, economic support for Russia was meager. When Russia’s economy floundered while those of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic pulled away, it was easy for Russians to decide they had deliberately been left behind. And that sentiment only grew stronger when American diplomats recklessly expanded NATO eastward after giving Russia either explicit or implied promises they would never do so.
America could have taken many paths with Russia. It could have given Russia huge economic support and tried to build it into an explicit military and political ally. Or, America could have concluded that the existential threat of Soviet expansionism was gone, and so an aggressive posture in Europe was no longer needed. It could have dialed back military spending and troop deployments and let Europe handle its own security.
Instead, Washington’s chosen path has been one of consistently turning opportunity into disaster. It expanded NATO repeatedly over Russian protests. In 2014, it endorsed the violent overthrow of an elected, pro-Russia Ukrainian government. Its most recent “accomplishment” was allowing the Ukraine war to erupt through an intransigent refusal to ever negotiate. The ramifications of that decision have cost America hundreds of billions of dollars and even imperiled the dollar’s position as global reserve currency.
Under America’s professional “Russia hands,” America’s relationship with Russia has only gotten worse, and her strategic position has only grown weaker. In short, the “Russia hands” are frauds and charlatans, with a thirty-five-year record of utter failure.
The same could easily be said for Iran. Another recent article attacking Witkoff proceeds thusly.
In the hurry to seal a deal with Iran inside two months, Trump, unlike in all previous nuclear talks with Tehran, has barred complicating European interests from the negotiation room.
To Iran’s relief, Witkoff has not tabled an agenda that strays beyond stopping Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has not raised Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Nor has he tabled demands that Iran end arms supplies to its proxies fighting Israel.
That has alarmed Israel, and to a lesser extent Europe, which sees Iran’s desire to have sanctions lifted as a rare opportunity to extract concessions from Tehran.
In other words, Witkoff is focused on the core question, the only one that merits so much attention at all: keeping Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal. Everything else, however aggravating it might be, is in fact completely secondary. Iran’s military cannot threaten America. Whatever conventional threat it poses can easily be contained by other regional powers, with U.S. support if necessary. Witkoff knows it. But “diplomatic experts,” obsessed with enlarging their domains and prolonging conflicts endlessly, demand total victory rather than peace and endless sanctions until they get there. Unsurprisingly, with such people in charge, America has been in a mini-Cold War with Iran for nearly half a century, with no progress toward peace in sight.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s unconventional approach to diplomacy has repeatedly paid dividends. From 1948 through the start of Trump’s first term, despite repeated U.S. diplomatic efforts, only two Arab states ever formally recognized Israel: Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. President Trump’s diplomacy, spearheaded by Jared Kushner rather than the “experts” of Foggy Bottom, doubled the success of all his predecessors combined, earning recognition from Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. In Europe, Trump’s showy threats to leave NATO entirely helped drive members to finally up defense spending to the agreed-upon target of 2% of GDP. In the Western Hemisphere, meanwhile, Trump’s brand of personal diplomacy with Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador helped secure the “Remain in Mexico” agreement, which played the biggest role in successfully lowering border crossings in the second half of his first term.
Trump’s blend of instincts and new tactics gets results. Washington’s ossified culture of “expertise” has brought stagnation and failure. Now, that culture is trying to bring down the president’s point man on his most important foreign policy initiatives.
The Trump Administration shouldn’t fall for it. The swamp wants Witkoff gone not because he will fail, but because he will bring success on Trump’s terms, rather than theirs.
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