PEACE BE UPON YOU:  President Trump in Israel and Egypt yesterday repeatedly promised an end to conflict in the Middle East without outlining the next steps to make it happen. He told the Israeli legislature, the Knesset, that this is “not only the end of a war, this is the end of the age of terror and death.” 

  In Egypt, Trump and a host of leaders from Arab and European countries signed a peace deal. Neither Hamas nor Israel were represented at the signing.

  Trump received a hero’s welcome in Israel for engineering the 20-point peace plan that so far has produced a ceasefire and release of Hamas-held hostages in exchange for prisoners held by Israel. The President handed out red hats stitched with “Trump, The Peace President.”

  The last two years of warfare have crippled Hamas in Gaza, neutralized Hezbollah in Lebanon, and backed off Iran with heavy damage to their nuclear development. Trump surprised the Knesset with the suggestion of peace talks with Iran. “You know what would be great, if we could make a peace deal with them,” he said. “Would you be happy with that?” 

  As for Hamas, Trump repeatedly said “the war is over” although there is no plan in place for disarming the militants or governing and rebuilding Gaza, which is more than 80 percent destroyed. Hamas is already fighting rival factions in Gaza and arresting suspected informants. 

  While Palestinians are celebrating the ceasefire, you can only imagine the rage simmering among young males who have endured and survived two years of bombardment while 67,000 people around them were killed and their homeland reduced to rubble. The gunfire has stopped today, but what will bubble and boil over the next 10 years?

HOME AT LAST: Hostages and families were emotionally reunited yesterday in Israel. One man came home to the news that his entire family, also held hostage, were killed in an Israeli air strike. 

  In one of the more touching stories of survival and devotion, Hostage Avinatan Or, 32, was finally reunited with girlfriend Noa Argamani, 28, who also had been taken hostage on October 7^th, 2023. The image of a bleeding Argamani taken away on a Hamas motorcycle became one of the lasting images of the massacre and hostage taking. Argamani was rescued by Israeli forces in June of 2024.

THE SHUTDOWN SHOWDOWN: Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday that the government shutdown could become one of the longest in history unless Democrats accept the stopgap bill to fund and reopen the government.

“We’re barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history, unless Democrats dropped their partisan demands and passed a clean, no-strings-attached budget to reopen the government and pay our federal workers,” Johnson said in a press. 

  The longest shutdown in history was 35 days during the first Trump administration.

  Since the beginning of the shutdown Johnson has refused to recognize the Democrat position, that this is not simply partisan but an effort to extend healthcare subsidies that would preserve insurance coverage for ten or more million Americans. Johnson and other Republicans have repeated the lie that Democrats want to give healthcare coverage to illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants by law cannot receive publicly-funded health insurance.

  Johnson made his plea to re-open the government and pay federal workers, even while he has expressed no objection to the Trump administration firing federal employees in an act of vengeance to be blamed on Democrats. Johnson, for his part, has kept the House in recess so nothing else can get done until the shutdown is over.

THE REGIME:

— President Trump’s new tariffs of 10 to 50 percent on imported furniture, kitchen cabinets, and lumber went into effect today. The pre-tariff costs of building a home had already increased sharply.

— The Washington Post, New York Times, Newsmax, NPR, and other news outlets announced that their reporters will not sign a new set of rules restricting news gathering at the Pentagon. The agreement that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants reporters to sign limits them to reporting only officially-approved information … nothing leaked by insiders.

  Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, said in a statement that his magazine’s staff will not sign. “The requirements violate our First Amendment rights, and the rights of Americans who seek to know how taxpayer-funded military resources and personnel are being deployed,” he said. Goldberg was the journalist accidentally included in a Pentagon group chat revealing classified information.

THE OBIT PAGE:  Clark Olofsson, the Swedish career criminal who was the subject of a botched hostage taking to free him from prison, spawning the expression “Stockholm Syndrome” as the hostages sympathized with their captors, died at age 78 back in June.

  Friends of Olofsson in 1973 took over a Stockholm bank seizing three women and a man as hostages to trade for his release. Over six days of captivity the hostages began to sympathize with the bank robbers and expressed hostility to the police. One woman told the cops over the phone, “They haven’t done a thing to us,” and  “Believe it or not, but we’ve had a really nice time here.” Police stormed the bank and no one was killed.

  A Swedish police psychologist later coined the term “Stockholm Syndrome” for the phenomenon of people sympathizing with their captors. 

  Olofsson spent half his life in prison and was last released in 2018.

THE SPIN RACK: Rain, floods, and mudslides have killed 64 people across five Mexican states near the Gulf of Mexico and left 65 missing. Roughly 100,000 homes have been affected. — Doug Lebda, the chief executive and chairman of LendingTree, the online loan marketplace, died Sunday in an accident riding an all-terrain vehicle on his family’s North Carolina farm. 

BELOW THE FOLD: Late night host Kimmy Kimmel said, President Trump “finally did something positive today, and I want to give him credit for it, because I know he’s not the type to take credit for himself.”

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