Is it just me or does Steve Witkoff look a bit like Frog and Toad? You know, the amphibious friends who costar in the iconic eponymous children’s books.
He sure looked slimy sitting beside Jared Kushner for their 60 Minutes interview on CBS with Leslie Stahl on Sunday about the Gaza Peace Summit.
If this analogy sounds ridiculous, I have done my job. Because that’s how the situation feels: two businessmen negotiating “peace” in a region far from their own.
“I don’t think people realize that he gave us a lot of authority to negotiate,” Witkoff said. “We explained it to him, I think, thoroughly. But he gave us lots of authority Leslie.”
Apparently Trump is quite the delegator. Don’t worry, though, Witkoff and Kushner checked in with the president to ensure their plan was a good deal.
“We did check in often, but that feeling of comfortability on our part, it allowed us to freewheel it a little bit,” Witkoff said.
Witkoff and Kushner negotiated the deal, but Trump was the one to receive high praise at the Knesset — Israel’s parliament — during his near-hour long speech declaring peace in the Middle East.
“This is not only the end of a war, this is the end of an age of terror and death, and the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God,” Trump said.
Trump, not usually one to share credit, did heap on compliments to his friend and Middle East envoy, Witkoff:
“I know some negotiators that are so good, but you wouldn’t have had peace in the Middle East [without Witkoff],” Trump said. “You would be in World War III right now with some of these guys.”
One might be wondering why Marco Rubio was not present during the negotiations. And why Jared Kushner, who has no formal role in the U.S. government, was there instead. (If you went to Harvard, you might already know the answer.)
Just last year, the Kush-man — my pet name for Trump’s son-in-law; who looks suspiciously pale for living in Miami — told an audience of Harvard students that Gaza could be “valuable” waterfront property.
“Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable… if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner said at the event.
Rebuilding Gaza will take a lot of time and some $50 billion, Kushner said on 60 Minutes. He visited the area during his trip and said it “looked almost like a nuclear bomb had been set off.”
The next steps cannot begin, however, until HAMAs is stripped of their weapons. How this will happen is unclear. Will U.S. troops be involved? “That’s not the intent,” Kushner said.
Did Kushner study foreign policy? No, but he credits all he knows to Trump.
“I was trained in foreign policy really in President Trump’s first term by seeing an outsider president come into Washington with a different school of foreign policy than had been brought in place for the 20 or 30 years prior,” he said. “Taking pragmatic stances, trying to use strength to avoid wars and figuring out how to make deals, not lecture the world.”
Kushner here implies: Trump’s foreign policy approach is the same as Ronald Reagan’s. This is not really news, but it is interesting to hear facts reconfirmed — as truth is hard to come by in Trump’s orbit.
New Ownership at CBS
Leslie Stahl, who earlier this year said she was she was “pessimistic” about declining trust in the media, did not push back very hard on her interviewees. I wonder if she was restrained by her new boss: Bari Weiss.
Weiss, who dramatically left The New York Times in 2020 to start her own conservative news outlet: The Free Press, was appointed to lead CBS less than a month ago. And her boss, David Ellison, took his seat at the top of Paramount — CBS’s parent company — in August.
Maybe Ellison and Weiss kept Stahl from pushing too hard in the interview, but they might have been the reason Witkoff and Kushner agreed to speak at all.
Like that iconic Tootsie-Pop commercial from the ‘90s goes: “The world may never know.”
Ashley Elizabeth Miller 
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