The Price of Trump

Imagine being Benjamin Netanyahu this week.

Or any Israeli who cheered the strike that started this wretched war and rejoiced at the prospect of total victory, at long last, over their most dangerous enemy; who actually believed that the man in the Oval Office—Donald Trump—was the presidential partner of their dreams: bold, unsentimental, willing to do what cautious presidents would not, willing to stay the course and get the job done.

Now they have learned what everyone who does business with Donald Trump eventually learns. An iron truth of war, of life: Character is destiny. A man's nature is his fate, and the fate of all who lash themselves to him.

Trump rolls the dice, it is true. His willingness to try things other presidents had not resulted in the Abraham Accords, the strike last June on Iran's nuclear sites, and the raid in Caracas to seize Nicolás Maduro.

The dice ran hot. The longshots came in, and Trump mistook luck for genius. He always has.

Because the gambler who rolls big enough, long enough, eventually rolls snake-eyes. Trump blustered into this war dreaming of regime change and a remade Middle East. He is slinking out of it like a child caught setting fires in the neighbor's trash can—like a bored toddler watching his tower of blocks come down across the living-room rug.

And the Israelis are left holding the bill. Frozen out of the negotiations, not even shown the text of the agreement. Tens of billions in Iranian assets unfrozen, sanctions waived, a reconstruction fund that will buy missiles and drones rather than schools and hospitals, and—at Tehran's own demand—new limits on Israel's operations against Hezbollah, even as the rockets keep falling on the Galilee.

Trump cursed Bibi out—”You’re f*cking crazy,” he said to the Israeli Prime Minister.

And then he pronounced the mullahs "very rational."

He wanted out, that’s all. A few months of testosterone and televised explosions, then the panicked dash for any exit, costs be damned.

It’s infuriating, the way so many people—American voters, powerful CEOs, Israel’s leadership—keep buying into Trump’s transparently fake tough-guy shtick. They fall at his feet, degrade themselves in flattering him, dream he’ll make their dreams come true.

But this is the thing the Israelis should have known, the thing everyone always knows too late: this isn’t really a betrayal.

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Ask the plumbers and painters and cabinetmakers of Atlantic City—the small contractors who finished their work on his casinos and were paid pennies on the dollar, or nothing, while he declared bankruptcy and walked away richer.

Ask the banks that learned, one by one, to stop lending to him.

Ask the students of Trump University.

The pattern is older than most of the people who are now astonished by it: you do the work, you carry the risk, you deliver the goods—and then you watch him keep the upside and hand you the losses.

Ask the Republican senators who sold their civic souls for his blessing and were still primaried and pilloried anyway the moment they wavered.

Ask Jeff Sessions, the first senator to endorse Trump, discarded the instant his usefulness expired.

Ask Mike Pence, who stood loyally at his side for four years and was rewarded, on the sixth of January, with a mob chanting for his hanging while Trump sat and watched it on TV.

Ask Michael Cohen, who swore he'd take a bullet and took a prison sentence instead. Loyalty to Trump is a one-way street, and the traffic runs in only one direction—toward him.

Ask his ex-wives.

The lesson in every case is the same, and it is the only lesson he has ever taught:

Everyone else—allies, partners, voters, wives, nations—is an instrument. Instruments are useful until they are not. Then they are set down and forgotten, and he is on to the next deal, the next war, the next gold-leafed monument to himself, the next woman, genuinely puzzled that anyone expected anything else.

In a strange and twisted way, Donald Trump is an honest man. He has never hidden it.

"When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now," he told a biographer years ago, "I'm basically the same."

He told us. He tells us every day. Still, millions in the US and around the world simply decline to believe him.

Israel believed in the Trump it wanted—the strongman, the dealmaker, the friend. And now they are meeting the only Trump there has ever been. But this time, the stakes aren’t a subcontractor's unpaid invoice or a senator's wounded pride. The stakes are a mortal enemy emboldened, an alliance shaken, American credibility in tatters, a whole region now tilting toward Tehran.

Character counts. We all learn this, early or late. It’s the only thing that counts.

And it counts most of all when it is too late to do anything about it.

The bill for doing business with Donald Trump always comes due. He has spent his whole life arranging for someone else to be standing there to pay it.

—Terry