In this issue’s front page article and editorial (“Trump: Israel to ‘Pay’ for Embassy Move” August 22, 2018 and “No, Mr. President, the Only ‘Turn’ the Palestinians Seek Is the Right of ‘Re-Turn’” August 22, 2018), concern was expressed, and rightly so, about President Trump saying that Israel would have to pay a “higher price” for the embassy move. I am a strong supporter of Trump, not because of his stellar characteristics and tweets, but because of his many actions favorable to both America and Israel. With this in mind, I feel that we should hold off on being too critical of Trump right now and give him the benefit of the doubt until we see more of his policy.

You also alluded to Trump’s “art of the deal” slogan, which I think is very apt. It is almost universal among the media, the public and politicians of all stripes that Trump is “impulsive,” “capricious,” “pops off on a whim,” etc. Whenever Trump tweets at 3 a.m., or stakes out a position on some issue, usually an extreme position, everyone goes apoplectic and takes it as proof that he is totally deranged and has to be removed from office.

However, everyone surely knows that Trump’s background is more “the art of the deal” than it is politics. Trump did not invent negotiations nor is the sole practitioner of it. It has been going on since the earliest of time. One need only read in Bereishit of the negotiation between Abraham and the children of Cheit for a burial place for Sarah. Also, one need not have an MBA to know that in any negotiation, the opening move is to put forward the maximum position, and then start to cut back during the compromising phase. Every kindergartner trading baseball cards knows that.

The complication with this strategy is that in today’s charged atmosphere, any of Trump’s opening bids is immediately attacked by all sides as being that of an extremist, far-right radical maniac, and this severely inhibits his negotiating position. Yet in spite of this, I think he is doing remarkably well in most of his negotiations, considering this fierce opposition. And he could do even better with just a modicum of cooperation instead of determined resistance by his opponents. I think he has earned that, until we see otherwise.