e forced it to happen and it would show that he had the control. But if it doesn't happen and it goes the other way, it's really going to prove that Netanyahu actually does run the country. So I'm exaggerating a little bit. That's a little bit of hyperbole, but this matters. Everybody's watching this. So unless the two of them suddenly act like they're exactly on the same page, it's going to look like somebody won and somebody lost between Trump and Netanyahu. So I think that they'll pretend to be on the same page even if they're not to avoid that.

I guess a bunch of Muslim-majority nations are asking Israel to withdraw and they're thinking that if the fighting stops and Israel withdraws to some predetermined line that all the hostages will be released and then they can work on putting together some kind of government and repopulating the place. Do you think that's going to happen? Do you think that Hamas is going to release all the hostages without having a guarantee that they'll have some power or that they'll have some safety or get to keep some weapons or something? I don't think so. I don't think that they're going to release any hostages until they get what they want. And Israel is very clear, as is the United States, that they're not going to get what they want. What they want is some ongoing power and control and a seat at the table. There's no way they're going to get that. In fact, all of the Hamas leadership is going to be dead under every scenario. If they make a deal, they'll give up their weapons and Israel will eventually hunt them down and they'll all have accidents. And if they don't give up their weapons, Israel will hunt them down in their tunnels and kill them. So the Hamas leadership, they're kind of dead no matter what. So if they can buy a few days of not being dead by making the hostage thing last longer, I feel like they will. So it's hard to imagine that an actual deal will get done, but as I said, I'll talk to you about Trump's persuasion play, which is really strong.

Israel, speaking of Israel, there's some reports from Reuters. Danny Haigh is writing that Israel might want to quote "mow the grass" in Iran. Now if you haven't heard that term in a military context, mowing the grass means that new terrorists or new bad guys have popped up and they have to go back in and just kill the new batch and then wait for another batch to pop up like grass and they'll have to go in and mow the grass again. So apparently whatever bombing has already happened in Iran didn't get everything that Israel needs to get. So they're thinking about going back in. What would happen to the peace negotiations with Gaza if Israel decided this week to go in and bomb Iran again? Might happen. Well, it might be looked at as trying to derail the Gaza thing because Israel has a win-win situation. Maybe one win would be the peace deal works and that's a pretty big win. The other way to win would be the peace deal falls apart and there's no way to resolve it and then they win the hard way. They probably lose their hostages, but they would eventually have complete control over Gaza in the short term and the long term. So it's not clear to me that Israel, or at least Netanyahu, I won't say Israel, I'll say Netanyahu, it's not clear to me he wants this to work. Is that fair? It's not clear that Netanyahu, not Israel because Israel's got a lot of different opinions, but I'm not sure Netanyahu wants it to work because if it doesn't work, he's going to get everything he wants: stay in power, get to destroy Hamas completely, get to essentially annex it. But where things are heading now is the beginning of what would be a two-state solution, and that's definitely not what Netanyahu wants. He doesn't want that second state. So we'll see.

All right, let me give you a little Trump persuasion lesson. I'm going to tell you what he's doing, right? And oh my god, is he doing it right? Just like you've never seen. Doesn't mean it's enough. So I'm gonna simultaneously say that what Trump is doing is just world class. Couldn't do better, but it might not be enough. Might not be enough. But maybe you'll learn something in the process.

Number one, if you want to be persuasive, credibility. Boy, you can't beat that. Credibility means that you have a track record of doing things that maybe were hard or at least things you said you were going to do. If you've got that going for you, that just is so persuasive. I would say that that's Elon Musk's superpower among others. He's got a few superpowers, but one of them is that if Elon Musk says, I can make a robot and it'll be a good robot, the fact that there's nothing about that that seems real to me, I still trust him. I still trust that he knows how to make a robot even though I can't. I just have trouble imagining it'll work in the short run. But he's so credible because of the things he's done already that looked impossible. He's persuasive.

Now Trump has that situation with trying to get a peace deal because look at what he's done to become credible. The first thing he had to do is be the biggest badass, right? You're not going to get a peace deal if you're the peace guy. Does that make sense? If you're the war guy, you can get a peace deal 'cause people really want to stay away from the war guy. Ooh, war guy. War guy. So settle down. Settle down, war guy. Okay. Okay, we'll give you some peace.

So look at what Trump has done from his first term. He did the mother of all bombs. He took out Soleimani. He did that highly successful strike with Israel on the Iran nuclear sites. Now he's blowing up Venezuelan drug boats. And then he changes the Department of Defense to the Department of War. You make sure it's funded and he uses the word lethality over and over again. We're going to make it lethal, lethal, getting rid of the woke. And all of those things create a picture that says Trump doesn't bluff. That's really important. When he says if you don't get this done, there will be hell to pay, he means there will be hell to pay. That's not just a bluff and it's because he has credibility because he's created this track record.

On top of that, and I've never seen anybody accomplish this. This is one of the greatest accomplishments in persuasion you'll ever see. We'll see if it pays off, but here's the accomplishment. On one hand, he looks like the dictator authoritarian strongman who is willing to do things like kill Soleimani and drop bombs on Iran. So he's that guy. At the same time, even I saw his critics on MSNBC fully admit that Trump unambiguously and honestly hates war. That's his critics. His critics have completely accepted that Trump is the most anti-war president we've ever seen. At the same time that he's the toughest, the most badass. He's the most badass military president and also by far the most peace-loving, will risk his life for peace, will put everything on the line for peace.

Now he claims he has seven peace deals. Now you could argue how many of those seven he really made a difference. India and Pakistan might say well I think that was going to happen anyway. But it's very important that he creates the image that he was at least an important part of the process in seven different peace deals. Now it doesn't have to be 100 percent true. It just has to be in your head. So you're holding in your head at the same time these two opposites. He's the baddest badass military guy and he will definitely whack you if you don't play along. He will definitely take you out. He'll take out your little drug boats. He'll take out your whole country if he has to. But he will fight harder for peace than anybody ever has.

Now how do you pull that off? How are you both people? Only Trump. Trump's the only person who could be both of those people at the same time and completely sell it. I completely believe he's the baddest badass. I completely believe that he wants peace more than any president ever has. That's amazing.

And this also gets me to the next persuasion point. Deadlines. Deadlines are absolutely necessary when you have some kind of open-ended situation. And a war is by its nature an open-ended situation. So what Trump does is something that probably he learned doing construction because if your builder says, oh we ran into some problems, it's going to take us longer than we thought, if you don't get him to commit to a new deadline, it'll never get done. It'll just never get done. You got to say, all right, you're fired if you don't get this done by the end of the week. And that's sort of what Trump did with Hamas. He was a little weak on giving them a real deadline, but then he finally said if you don't have this worked out by Sunday, there'll be all hell to pay. And the deadline is a persuasion factor. You have to have a deadline, otherwise nothing happens. Nothing ever happens without a deadline. So he knows that. So he puts a deadline on it. And sure enough, as soon as he puts the deadline on it, stuff starts to happen. Deadlines really, really matter, especially in negotiations.

The other thing he does is what I call the biggest gap persuasion. He makes the biggest difference between making him happy and making him unhappy. So if you make him unhappy, all hell will break loose. But if you make him happy and make peace, then he will help you rebuild this jewel of the Middle East. It won't just be, oh maybe we can get back to where we were. No, it'll be way better. It'll be better than anything you could even imagine. The quality of life there eventually would be spectacular. The economy would be better. The danger would be gone. So he paints a picture where if you don't play along, there's going to be hell to pay and he can back it up because he has credibility. But he makes sure that you know it's not just about avoiding the bad thing. It's you've got this good thing that's so good. It's just so good you should want it even if you weren't escaping the bad thing. But if you put them together, you've got a really bad thing that you can escape. But you're not just escaping, you're getting to this great thing, this great future. So that's another technique. You want the biggest difference between making you happy, doing what you want, and not doing what you want. Maximum. Nobody does that better. He is the number one best person at maximizing the distance between make me happy and don't make me happy. And he does it with everything. So it's not an accident. You see him do it with everything really.

And then lastly he has a vision. So the vision gets everybody to focus on the end point. And I think that makes things which seemed impossible suddenly become possible because everybody's thinking about it. You have to get people to honestly imagine and visualize an end point of peace and everything working out or it'll never happen. So he makes sure that you can imagine it. He makes you think it's possible.

When Hamas responded at first and said, oh yeah, we're okay with this peace deal as long as we have power and everything, to me it looked like there was no chance because Hamas was still asking for more than they would ever get, which is to stay in power. But what's interesting is that Trump acted like it was close to a deal, which is brilliant because if Trump acts like it's really close even if the reality is that it's not close, it makes it close because people's brains will sort of automatically be attracted to whatever they think about and they're visualizing. So he makes you think about and visualize, wow, we're almost there. We almost got a deal. We're right there. We're not right there. We're not 'cause the biggest thing is still in dispute. What happens to Hamas? It's the biggest thing. But the fact that he treats it like you're almost there brings along a lot of people and they go, huh, he is very credible. He did get seven deals done-ish. Maybe he knows more than we do. Oh my goodness. Now I could imagine that this could happen for the first time. How hard would it be to ever imagine that there could be a sort of a really good base of peace in the Middle East? It's almost impossible to imagine, isn't it? But what did Trump do? Trump is allowing us to imagine it for the first time. I would say that I'm imagining it for the first time. I just imagined that it wasn't possible and they would just fight forever. But now maybe I wouldn't place a big bet on it. But I can totally imagine it. And you have to get people to imagine the thing before the thing can happen. Success. We can now imagine the thing. Do you know how big a deal that is? That we can imagine that this could work. Just imagine. And I'm not even talking about getting it done. That's a whole other level. But even to get to the point where all the people involved, all of them are now imagining it possible. That's only Trump. He's the only one who could do that. Nobody else could do that. Maybe an Elon Musk could do it if he were in that job.

Trump is also treating it like it's almost a sure thing, which is even better. Instead of just saying, well you can kind of imagine it might work, he's way beyond that. He's already treating it like, oh yeah, we're going to get this done and I told Bibi he's going to have to do this. See how that all fits together? So you imagine it and then he tells you that he's going to make them do it. And because he's credible, you say, can he do that? Can he just make Netanyahu say yes? Now you can imagine it. I don't know if he can, but I can imagine it. And that's a big step 'cause other people are imagining it too. If everybody's imagining it, you get there.

But my favorite thing besides the fact that he can hold out that Gaza will be rebuilt to be some jewel of the Middle East, that's visual and gets you to think about the prize. But also this could be the beginning of a permanent expansion of the Abraham Accords. It could be a real good model of all the countries working together productively