On Monday President Trump signed an agreement with Arab leaders that has been called a “miracle” and “historic.” It has largely (so far) paused the Israeli onslaught in the Gaza strip and served to release the remaining live Israeli hostages held by Hamas and upwards of 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

Before attending the signing ceremony in Egypt, Trump was feted in triumph by Israeli officials at the Knesset. Aside from bestowing on him the moniker “President of Peace” they said he would be remembered “as a giant of Jewish history, one for whom we must look back two and a half millennia into the mists of time to find a parallel. Cyrus the Great. Donald J Trump, you are a colossus who will join the pantheon of history,” said Amir Ohana, Speaker of the Knesset. He referred to the 6th century BC Persian King who liberated the Jews from Babylonia to create their own self-governing province in the Persian Empire, also known as the Second Temple period.

Benjamin Netanyahu was also met with thunderous applause and a long standing ovation, as was Steve Witkoff, whose name was even chanted. In his own remarks Trump went on for nearly an hour, charting the litany of things he had done for Israel since his first presidency, including recognizing the Israeli capital in Jerusalem, and acknowledging right there that it was due to the aggressive lobbying of the billionaires Miriam and Sheldon Adelson. They were strange speeches overall, in that the word “Palestinians” only came up once, even though the deal was to eventually afford the Palestinian people the same self-rule the Jewish people had enjoyed thanks to Cyrus in 540 BC.

The speeches, too, mentioned very little about the United States, other than Washington had given everything it could — including $21.7 billion in taxpayer dollars — to the Israeli cause over the last two years. Trump even boasted that he had approved every weapon Netanyahu had asked for, even ones he never knew existed.

This week I brought in my friend Ret. Col. Doug Macgregor to the show, because after the dust settles, one wonders what any of this has to do with America and the vaunted America First foreign policy that Trump had been promising since 2016. For the last two years, Americans have been told this was “our fight too” but it was never properly explained. It’s been clear in polling that Americans haven’t been convinced either, even Republicans are waning more visibly in their support for giving Israel everything it wants in order to wage a war that has resulted in the collective punishment and deaths of more than 67,000 Gazans, most of them civilians. 

Today, Gaza is in ruins and we are being told it was worth it. Was it?