Clashing Trump Images
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 10, 2025
While we await word on what Donald Trump dismisses as “the details” of ceasefire and “eternal” Middle East peace, we have a moment to think about the joy of freed hostages and the many layered questions that are being shunted aside.
From the announcements and early giddiness, we are expecting return of all Israeli hostages, alive and dead, by Monday or Tuesday, along with the release of hundreds of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails — and end of active conflict. Already, Israeli and Hamas representatives — who apparently still do not talk with each other — continue to erode many of the remaining “21 proposals” forced on them by Trump, Gulf nations, world leaders and the demands of their own populations.
In news coverage, reflections have varied widely from pictures of dancing in the streets to concern over whether there are the makings of a durable ceasefire. Just wait until Trump shows up for the photos among released hostages to hear his name shouted in glorification. Fox News simply celebrates that Trump has achieved the impossible, skipping over refusals by Hamas to disarm, for example. The New York Times analysis sees a major diplomatic breakthrough but dwells on what still can blow up. Other outlets have decided that the measure of success here not in Gaza, but in Oslo where the Nobel committee might decide at the last moment to recognize Trump’s campaign for the honor for its Peace Prize decision today. (Wouldn’t you think the Nobel folks already had decided if the scheduled announcement is today?)
Apart from questions about Middle East peace is a conundrum about Trump.
How do we reconcile this image that Trump wants to accept of him as a beneficent, humanitarian, global leader willing to move heaven, earth and Palestinians for peace with the belligerent, insulting, autocratic, America First promoter at home who cannot stomach free speech, is deploying armed troops against his own people and cannot even to have a substantive conversation with political opponents about, of all things, rocketing health care insurance costs to end a government shutdown.
How is this would-be Nobel laureate for peace the guy who is sinking drug speedboats in international waters, rounding up U.S. citizens, separating migrant families, firing thousands of federal workers, openly prosecuting political enemies and remaking the American democracy into something quite king-like.
Control, Pressures in Common
Despite the radically different outcomes, what feel like points of commonality seem to be Trump’s efforts at seeking control and a studied unpredictability to create pressures to get his way — regardless of law, tradition or boundaries of any sort.
CNN, among several outlets looking at recent events to retrace Trump’s apparent success at “willing his plan into reality” by heavy pushiness with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Gulf leaders whom Trump sees as business partners, and complete disdain for Palestinians at the heart of what happens next in the Middle East.
He forced Netanyahu to apologize to the emir of Qatar for seeking to kill Hamas leaders using Qataris as intermediaries, for example, even apparently having a Qatari diplomat writing a script for Netanyahu. Trump also publicly released his 20 points of “agreed” principles before Gulf nations were finished and certainly without Israeli signoff. When Hamas balked at major proposals about arms and an incoming government, he chided Netanyahu in a private call that became public to insist that Israel endorse the plan.
As we have seen, Trump’s insistence won out, though similar start-and-stop moves have proved futile with Russia over the Ukraine war, and even as tensions continue in some of the seven wars Trump claims he has stopped since January.
The only important thing here is the perception that the hostages are coming home, removing the main reason for continued fighting, and that Trump is the reason why.
At Home and Abroad
In like fashion, our own American dilemma about deploying troops to Chicago and other blue cities over the objections of local authorities, the dismissing attitudes about the humane treatment of migrants and even U.S. citizens caught in deportation wars, Trump’s constant hectoring now turned prosecution of perceived political enemies is all about control, and the unrestrained use of threats to get his unquestioned way.
If we get by this current period of intense disorder, we will look back to see Trump’s insistences at the heart of our multiple, overlapping conflicts over values and democracy itself.
As Trump is showing us, it is the act of deploying troops to Washington, D.C. itself and not the elimination of crime, as he claims, that is the end goal. In Chicago, the ugliness of roaming, masked Homeland Security officers in military camo randomly arresting and holding even citizens is about intimidation, not the safety of either agents or of the country.
That the agents are followed by Homeland videographers to create social media propaganda is a means of spreading fear, not a cleanup of any Chicago street disorder. The same is true with Trump’s broad rewrites of election history, the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt in his name, the neutering of Congress and the Supreme Court through partisan controls.
Maybe we ought to ask Oslo to create a Nobel Control and Intimidation Prize.
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