Donald Trump concluded a summit with Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago on Monday with a vow that Hamas would have “hell to pay” if it did not disarm under the terms of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement in the coming weeks.
After two days of whirlwind diplomacy at his “Winter White House”, the president was insistent that his negotiating teams were making progress towards ending two destructive conflicts in eastern Europe and the Middle East, where U.S. involvement is increasingly being questioned and staggering death tolls continue to mount.
The actual details of the U.S.’s supposed gains in either discussion remain unclear, however, and beyond Trump’s assertions, there is little evidence to support the idea that either the war in Ukraine or the horrific conditions in Gaza will abate any time soon.
On Monday, the president spoke side by side with Netanyahu after declaring that the two had solved several vague points of disagreement. At a news conference, Trump repeated a murky timeline for Hamas forces to disarm within the Gaza Strip, and indicated that the war would resume in earnest if the militant group violated the agreement in any manner.
“[I]f they don’t disarm as they agreed to do, they agreed to it, then there will be hell to pay for them. And we don’t want that. We’re not looking for that,” said the president. “They’re going to be given a very short period of time to disarm. And we’ll see how that works out.”
He could only offer predictions of doom for the militant group, which remains stubbornly entrenched in parts of the Gaza Strip despite the Israeli military’s two-year-long attempts to dismantle the group and kill its leaders. Israeli forces have succeeded in eliminating most of the group’s physical control over Gaza, but numerous fighters are thought to remain.
With Trump’s threats echoing the same language he’s used throughout the entire peace process, however, the Israel/Gaza conflict provokes the same question that was raised on Sunday after he met with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky at Mar-a-Lago. With the Ukrainian leader standing next to him, Trump made the shocking declaration that Putin was eager to help Ukraine rebuild after more than three years of war and wanted the country to “succeed”, causing Zelensky to visibly react with surprise.
In both cases, the president remained evasive over how he planned to force various parties to get fully on board with his peacemaking agenda beyond vague threats and coercion. In the case of Hamas, it’s unclear what leverage Trump thinks he has against the militant group beyond giving Israel carte blanche authority to target it once again — something that his predecessor largely did, and which hasn’t extricated Hamas from the Gaza Strip so far.
In the case of Russia, Trump’s feelings appear to possibly be clouded by his own feelings towards Putin and a whole host of issues dating back to the investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign and its alleged ties to Moscow. His relationship with Netanyahu is similarly chummy, and the Israeli prime minister spent much of his time at Mar-a-Lago on Monday attempting to butter up the president with praise and the promise to give Israel’s highest cultural honor, the Israel Award, to Trump. In turn, the U.S. president repeated his support for Israel’s president to issue a pardon clearing Netanyahu of any criminal liability amid his accusations of bribery. He also denied that Israel had violated the ceasefire with the killings of Palestinians since the conflict was halted.
Negotiations aimed at ending both conflicts appear to have largely stalled. Allies of Israel, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, who visited the country last week, have declared that Hamas is rearming and ignoring the ceasefire terms. News separately broke Monday that Putin accused Ukrainian forces of carrying out a strike on his presidential residence after Russian forces hit an apartment block in Kyiv over the weekend, killing two people.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed Monday that Trump had another “positive” call with Putin after their discussion ahead of the Zelensky meeting a day earlier, but offered no further details.
With 2025 in the rear view mirror, the president is now wading into an election year with the foreign conflicts his allies see as a distraction still top of mind, thanks to his own inability to reach the finish line on the time frame he himself promised to meet. As the midterms inch closer, the president’s patience may very well wear thin, and his team’s desperation to notch real peace agreements will ramp up.
That presents a serious risk, however, as for all of Trump’s efforts to tout his peacemaking abilities, the abandonment of one or both arenas of negotiation would carry a political cost for the president who ran on his ability to solve both conflicts in his first year. Already, Trump has failed to meet his unserious vow of ending the two wars immediately; backing down would be a public admission of that failure on a much more profound level at a politically vulnerable moment for the president and his party.
As a result, the president enters 2026 between a rock and a hard place. In both cases, the president will likely have to offer something new to shift the dynamics and put the finish lines back in sight.
For all his allies’ yearning for Trump to completely refocus his time on a domestic platform, the reality is that Trump ran on a global agenda and is running out of time to score better marks than his predecessor on either the issue of Gaza or the war in Ukraine.
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