President Donald Trump, who publicly touts himself as a “dealmaker-in-chief,” is privately upset at his failure to strike deals that will end the two wars he has sought to end, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
At a closed-door meeting with top donors at Mar-a-Lago last week, Trump admitted that the frustration he feels from his inability to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine keeps him up at night, people in the room told the WSJ.
He said that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump has frequently claimed is negotiating in good faith, has been driving an especially hard bargain. Putin wants “the whole thing,” Trump said, referring to Ukraine.
The president also told the audience that bringing the war in Gaza to an end was tough, he had found, because “they’d been fighting for a thousand years,” the Journal reported.
Trump has marketed himself as a wily negotiator since long before he entered the political arena. During his first life as a real estate developer, Trump’s profile was elevated by the 1987 release of a best-selling book that shared his business strategy: The Art of the Deal.
The posturing hasn’t translated into concrete success during his second term in office. Despite vowing to bring a quick end to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the president has yet to deliver on either promise.
“Bluster and theatrics have their role in diplomatic high-wire acts, but so do details and hard work,” Dan Baer, a former ambassador in Barack Obama‘s administration, told the Journal.
Kyle Haynes, a foreign policy professor at Purdue University, told the Journal that Trump’s wild claims—like that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day in office—opened the door to harsh criticism when the reality falls short.
“If he hadn’t promised such things repeatedly throughout the campaign, it’d be wildly unfair to criticize him for failing to achieve them,” Haynes said. “But he did.”
Trump delivered perhaps the first major diplomatic victory of his second term on Saturday, when he announced that India and Pakistan had agreed to a ceasefire after months of rising tensions. Within hours, however, India accused Pakistan of violating the agreement.
In a statement to the Journal, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said that Trump had been “laser-focused on delivering peace around the world and stopping bad actors from doing harm to Americans and our allies.”
“Their approach has been successful—Houthis agreed to a ceasefire, 47 Americans detained abroad have come home, NATO countries are increasing defense spending, China is deterred, and we are closer to peace in the Russia-Ukraine War than ever before,” she said.
The White House did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on the Journal‘s article.
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