American political leaders have forgotten how to be gracious to their opponents when people on the other side do something for which they deserve credit. Our antagonisms have become so deep and bitter that we are reluctant to give an inch to our political adversaries.
This is not good for democracy.
What we need is a new ethics of opposition. Its prime directive is simple: fight hard and unrelentingly for democracy and the rule of law. But when, for whatever reason, our opponents achieve something valuable, say so.
It pains us to follow this maxim at a time when so much that we care about is under attack.
Yet now is a good moment to follow it, even though, as Newsweek’s Bobby Ghosh puts it, “It isn't easy to praise someone (President Trump) who habitually, preemptively, and lavishly praises himself.” But there is no denying that the Trump Administration has just achieved a major and important foreign policy objective, a ceasefire in Gaza and the return of twenty hostages who were abducted during the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
As Ghosh argues, “(T)he guns in Gaza have quieted. And it isn't because of the nudgings of real estate developers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the promptings of Qatar and Egypt, the pleadings of Europe, the finger-wagging of human-rights organizations, or the hand-wringing of the United Nations alone.”
“The ceasefire,” he says, “is the gift of Donald Trump.”
Not sure that gift is the right word, for it is something given willingly with no expectation of payment or reward. Is that the right description for a president who is reportedly desperate to win the Nobel Peace Prize? Or for a president who was caught on a hot mic brokering a meeting between his son Erik and the President of Indonesia? Recall that Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., serve as executive vice presidents of the Trump Organization.
Gift or not, Trump got done what the Biden Administration did not accomplish. He induced, threatened, or cajoled the Israeli government to make at least a temporary peace with Hamas.
He did so after wasting a lot of time before drawing a line in the sand for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Ghosh observes, if the president had not gotten lost in fantasies about “real-estate opportunities in Gaza, thousands of Palestinian lives might have been saved, and more of the Israeli hostages would be in the bosom of their families.”
Better late than never.
President Biden’s former national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, got it right when, on October 12, he said about the ceasefire and hostage deal, “’I give credit to President Trump, I give credit to [Steve] Witkoff and [Jared] Kushner and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio. These are hard jobs. The president of the United States is the hardest job in the world, and these other jobs, including the job I occupied, are tremendously difficult…. And to get to something like today takes a village, and it takes determination and really hard work, and so I, without question, offer credit for that.’”
He was joined in that by Arizona’s Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. “’I think,’” Kelly said, “he should get a lot of credit. I mean, this was his deal. He worked this out.’”
Late-night television host and frequent Trump critic embraced the ethics of opposition, which we are championing, when he said, “What a day for Donald Trump…You know what? He finally did something positive today and I want to give him credit for it … “
Kimmel twisted the knife a bit with a bit of sarcasm about the president, saying, “he’s not the type to take credit for himself,” but quickly added, “the fact is the bombing has stopped, the hostages have been released, and Trump deserves some of the praise for that. So I know it sounds crazy to say, but good work on that one, President Trump.”
To hue to this line, we have to be able to focus on what someone does, no matter how much we dislike the person who does it or other things they do.
This is harder than it should be, not just because of the things the administration is doing at home, but because the leader of the free world never misses an opportunity to kick sand in the eyes of people he considers his enemies.
For example, while basking in the glory of his Middle East accomplishments, Trump told a story about a meeting he had with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi a decade ago and attacked 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee Hilary Clinton while doling so. As the president put it, “We knew each other from the beginning…. I was going to meet him, and then Hillary Clinton was following me…. And he liked me so much he never even got to see Hillary. ... [Sisi] didn’t want to waste a lot of time. He knew what was going to happen.”
Later, he asked El-Sisi if he remembered “crooked Hillary Clinton.”
That followed on the heels of the president’s speech to the Israeli Parliament, when he went out of his way to call former President Joe Biden's administration “the worst in U.S. history,” then said former President Barack Obama was "not far behind."
It doesn’t help that Trump is so eager for credit and so angry and resentful when he doesn’t get the amount of credit he craves. What CNN observed during his first term is even truer today: “The funnel cloud of anger, score-settling, political chaos and divisive rhetoric that swirls around Trump at all times also has the effect of drowning out debate about the nature of his policies and any good press that he does get.”
Trump makes it hard for liberals to adhere to our ethics of opposition because he “makes it impossible, in practice, for liberals to be tolerant (egalitarian), rational, and optimistic about human nature—three things that are essential aspects of liberal ideology and liberal psychology.” AS John Jost and Orsolya Hunyady say, the president “oozes authoritarian ugliness.”
As hard as it is, giving the president credit when he deserves it is not only the right thing to do, it also helps blunt the criticism that those who oppose him on most things are driven by blind hatred or Trump derangement syndrome, a belief that Trump encourages at every turn.
If we are to have any chance of repairing and rebuilding our democracy in a post-Trump world, we need to learn the lesson that all great strategists understand. Giving ground does not mean surrendering.
Doing so at the right time is necessary to make victory possible in the struggle to preserve democracy, even if Trump’s recent success turns out to resemble Ebeneezer Scrooge’s fictitious benevolence on Christmas Day.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.