This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and peace abroad doesn't necessarily mean peace at home.

Some of the conclusions that the president seemed to have drawn from interacting with some of the Middle East's biggest strongmen is that he needs to be more ruthless at home. Stick with us.

I feel like we need a miracle and it's several miracles and I'm very afraid that it's going to be much longer.

We imagine. When I spoke to Eli David in September of last year, his brother Eviatar had already been gone for 10 months. Eviitar was one of the 251 people who were taken from Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7th.

Well, Eli finally got his miracle. On Monday, two years and six days after that horrible moment, after being forced to dig his own grave for a Hamas propaganda video, Evyatar David was finally able to hug his family again.

Ha ha ha!

Emotional scenes like this played out across Israel as the last of the living hostages were released. It was joyous in Gaza and the occupied West Bank too, where nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners were allowed to return home.

This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.

President Donald Trump traveled to Israel and Egypt to celebrate the ceasefire deal he helped broker and to start talking with dozens of other countries about what comes next. Remember, hunger in Gaza is still widespread. Most of the enclave has been completely flattened by Israeli bombs. Hamas still controls certain areas.

Mr. President, on Gaza, how long will it take Hamas to disarm? And can you guarantee that is going to happen?

Well, they're going to disarm because they said they were going to disarm. And if they don't disarm, we will disarm them.

How we can do that.

I don't have to explain that to you, but if they don't disarm we will disarm them. They know I'm not playing games

Literally every other president who came before Trump has learned the hard way that lasting peace in the Middle East is much, much, MUCH easier said than done. But a ceasefire and hostage release is a major first step and a potential legacy defining move for a president who prides himself on making deals. But as Trump publicly angles for a Nobel Peace Prize, just how much does peace actually have to do with it. My guest today is CNN politics senior reporter Stephen Collinson. So Stephen, as we sit here on Tuesday morning, there's obviously still tons of questions about what the future holds for Palestinians who are trying to get by inside a decimated Gaza, what the future looks like for Israel. But as we look at where we are right now, how much credit is Trump getting personally for how we got to this moment?

Getting a lot of credit, both in Israel, around Europe and the Arab world and in the United States, unusually, including among some prominent Democrats. And there's a reason for that because he deserves it. I don't believe that this peace deal or ceasefire agreement, as it should be more accurately called would have happened without this president at this time. He had a unique capacity to bring Arab states behind this to create pressure on Hamas to finally cave.

Donald Trump is the greatest friend that the state of Israel has ever had in the White House.

And because of his very close relationship with the Israeli people, strong support for Israel over the span of his two presidencies now, he got political leverage which he could apply on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a crucial moment. And that really boxed Netanyahoo in and forced him to sign up for this ceasefire deal.

Well, see, now you can be a little bit nicer, baby, because you're not at war anymore, baby.

So in the moment and for what he's done over the last few weeks, Trump does deserve substantial credit.

When it comes to Netanyahu though, he has not gone as far as Trump has in terms of saying the war is over, saying like, that's it. So I imagine there would need to be more attention paid by Trump to this issue going forward if that idea of lasting peace is to be realized, right?

'Yeah, the president's continued and vigorous engagement is absolutely crucial. The question now is, will the president, who's not been a details man in the past, will he stay on top of this for every day of the rest of his term? Because that's what it's going to require. There's some massive questions that are unanswered, notably something that didn't really come up during his trip, and that is whether the the Palestinian people themselves. Will get a chance to dictate their own future, or whether this is something that Trump and outside states want to impose on them. There's also the question of politics in Israel. Is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with his far-right coalition willing or in a political position to follow through on some of the difficult questions? There's always in the Middle East been a problem, and it's the leaders on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the end have not had the political capacity and bandwidth or the willingness to make the hardest decisions that would allow a genuine peace process to be successful. If you look at either side of this, Hamas and Netanyahu, it's hard to be optimistic in the long run that that is in place now. And that is why Trump's power and personality is going to be so important to this.

We gotta take a quick break, but I'll have much more with Stephen right after this. Stick around. How much of this is Trump just trying to end the conflict and be able to take credit for that? Because he has this long list of conflicts that he claims to have ended. It seems to change by the day. And it's no secret that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize.

Right. Well, to start with that long list of conflicts that he supposedly ended is dubious. There are some in which he did play a useful role, for instance, the one between Thailand and Cambodia, when he used trade as a form of leverage to stop a border clash. But in terms of the Middle East deal, I think, yes, one of the reasons why Trump is doing this is because he wants to be seen as a global peacemaker.

So this long and difficult war has now ended. You know, some people say 3,000 years. Some people say 500 years. Whatever it is, it's the granddaddy of them all.

'He has a hankering to conclude what he said would be the world's biggest deal, ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and reshaping the Middle East. He also has, I think, strong economic motivations, both personal and for the United States. If you go back to his trip to the Arab world, his first foreign trip of his second term.

Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce not chaos, where it exports technology not terrorism.

He gave a speech in which he said, look, the time is to start making money in this region and to stop fighting. And that I think is at the root of his entire Middle East policy. But that desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, which he's often fulminating about the fact that Barack Obama got one months into his presidency, that is a very important force, I think, pushing Trump forward.

We should say we learned last week that the committee selected Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Carina Machado for the Nobel Peace Prize. The eligibility window ended in January, so it wasn't likely that Trump would get one this year. But I guess I'm wondering how the Nobel committee might look at these efforts to end the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine when you also look at other ways in which Trump has cut aid programs withdrawn from the World Health Organization and is firing missiles at suspected drug boats in the Caribbean.

Yeah, that's going to be exactly the issue. If you look at, take the Middle East situation first, because he hasn't really made any meaningful step towards peace in the Ukraine war, despite his efforts and his summit with President Vladimir Putin. In fact, the war is probably worse now than it was when he took office in January, but on the Middle east question, if you look at it in isolation, I think the president probably has a pretty strong case. For winning the Nobel Peace Prize next year. His intervention in this situation was crucial. It was something that nobody else can do. He brought parties together, which is one of the criteria around the Nobel peace prize and created a peace congress, which is exactly what the prize is supposed to award. But... That would also depend, I think, on this peace deal working and expanding throughout the coming year. But to your point, the Nobel committee typically awards Nobel peace prices to recipients who have a strong record of fighting against autocracy and fighting for democracy, people like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. That's not a case you can make about President Trump. As you said, the dubious legal grounds for this escalation against cartels and their speedboats off Venezuela seems to amount in many cases to extrajudicial killings for which the administration has given little evidence that they're involved in drugs trafficking. That's not something that's likely to sit well. With the principles of the Nobel committee. Also, Trump is trying to expand his push of troops into American cities, cities run by Democrats, which themselves seem to fly in the face of the Constitution. This is someone who said one of the key principles of his presidency is attacking enemies within. That is more like the behavior of some of the autocrats that the Nobel committee has tried to rebuke by awarding the prize in the past to democracy campaigners.

Yeah, and it's not like the prize has been without controversy in the past. They gave it to Henry Kissinger for his role in ending the Vietnam War, even though he helped prolong the conflict and have been accused of war crimes. But like you mentioned, the Trump administration is trying to cast Trump as the president of peace. But like you say. There are these actions within the US that Trump is taking that is very much aimed at sowing discord and conflict and casting the left as the enemy within. So how do you kind of square those ideas?

I think a lot of it is down to the character of Trump himself, the principles of his political project, the MAGA movement. You could sort of play a mind game here and say, well, Trump got absolute adulation in the Middle East. He was fated in Israel. He got the kind of universal praise that he never gets back home in the United States. So, is there a chance that he could change his approach?

I don't know what it is. I like the tough people better than I like the soft, easy ones. I don't know what the hell that is. It's a personality problem, I suspect. But this gentleman...

History would suggest that's very unlikely, first of all, because some of the conclusions that the president seemed to have drawn from interacting with some of Middle East's biggest strongmen is that he needs to be more ruthless at home.

And you are a great leader. You have very little crime.

'He talked about President El-Sisi of Egypt, for example, and commented during their meeting on Monday that Egypt doesn't have any crime because it doesn't play games. Well, Egypt is a totalitarian state with a secret police. It locks up opponents and is known for repression.

This gentleman from a place called Turkey has one of the most powerful armies actually in the world.

He also praised the Turkish leader, President Erdogan. Turkey is another authoritarian state where political dissent is crushed. But Trump said, he's a tough guy, he's always there when I need him.

He's such a tough guy, he is tough as you can be, but we love him and when they have a problem with you, they always call me to handle it.

This is a time when he flew back on Air Force One and talked about he had every right to invoke the Insurrection Act.

I can tell you, this guy's got so much money. They all have so much.

'So I think in many ways, President Trump feels more at home with those hard-man Arab leaders who don't necessarily draw a clear line between politics and trade and economics and their own business interests than he does with democratic leaders of developed states. So I would expect his triumph in the Middle East is likely to increase his appetite for wielding. Power at home, and he's got around him at home people like the White House Senior Aid Stephen Miller, the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, all of whom are deeply committed to pushing forward the more extreme aspects of Trump's project, the immigration deportation drive, and the so-called crackdown on crime. So I don't think we're going to see the seeds of a different presidency germinating from what happened to the at least.

So you're saying like, even as he is coming to the Middle East for a very noble goal, something that everybody wants to see, he's also taking these bits and pieces from foreign leaders who exhibit some of the worst tendencies and might feel like, hey, they're in my camp and I can kind of act on that at home as well.

Yeah, there's been a long record during both of his presences of Trump admiring dictators. The most notable of these is his relationship with President Vladimir Putin. He's often talked with admiration about how tough he believes Chinese President Xi Jinping is, unlike those leaders, those in Egypt and Turkey and China and Russia. There are still checks and balances in the United States, despite his attempts to degrade some of them. Look at the challenges in the courts to Trump's attempts to deploy National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, and to Chicago in recent weeks.

Yeah, they basically said, there's no rebellion here.

Right. You do have those kind of constraints on the presidents that Erdogan and C.C. And Putin don't have. And the question is, you know, how successful will President Trump be in pushing back against those, especially as these cases get higher up from the original district federal judges into appeals courts and ultimately where almost everything seems to end up in the Trump presidency in the Supreme Court with its conservative majority.

Well, as we talk about peace, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky scheduled to visit the White House on Friday. We'll see if Trump changes at all his approach in trying to end that war, a war he once said he would end in 24 hours. Stephen Collinson, I appreciate it

thanks so much.

'Meanwhile, as President Trump continues to threaten a crime crackdown in Democratic-run cities, the Pentagon is clamping down on the press. Virtually all major news outlets, including CNN, are refusing to sign restrictive new rules from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. They would prohibit reporters from obtaining or using unauthorized material, even if the information is unclassified. And what I'm describing there is just basically standard issue reporting. Hegseth says not signing the pledge could result in reporters losing their Pentagon Press Credential starting Wednesday, but that's something journalists say will not stop their work. That's all for us today. We're back on Sunday. In the meantime, you can leave a rating and a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show, and I'll talk to you later.