The Trump administration has gone from carrot-and-stick diplomacy to selfie-stick diplomacy.
A heretofore unknown envoy named Adam Boehler has been conducting back-channel talks with Hamas on behalf of the White House, and his inexperience is on full display. Boehler spent the weekend doing TV interviews, and in each one he sounds like an overexcited tourist who thinks the past few weeks in his life have been just so cool. It isn’t entirely clear why Boehler is even here, given the previous inexperienced envoy Steve Witkoff’s very public role in the first month of the administration as Washington’s man at the table.
So let’s back up: Last week it was revealed that Boehler, on behalf of the Trump administration, has been negotiating for the return of the one living American hostage remaining in Gaza and the bodies of other American hostages who were killed by Hamas in captivity. Boehler appears to have offered Hamas a pathway to remaining in Gaza after the war without releasing the remaining Israeli hostages…though he insists that isn’t his goal.
Still, whatever Boehler thinks he might have done is irrelevant because what he has actually done is offer Hamas the option of restoring the pre-October 7 status quo with minor adjustments. Or at least, he has given Hamas reason to believe that option is on the table. In so doing, this Donald Trump “apprentice” has already done damage to the cause of bringing the hostages home as soon as is humanly possible. He would have been the first one fired at the end of the first episode of his season of The Apprentice for what he’s done.
Let’s examine what Boehler said during his disastrous Sunday talk show tour. Hamas, he said, offered a hostage exchange “and a five-year to ten-year truce where Hamas would lay down all weapons and where the US, as well as other countries, would ensure that there are no tunnels, there’s nothing taken on the military side, and that Hamas is not involved in politics going forward.” This, said Boehler, was “not a bad first offer.”
Sorry, first offer? Talks have been ongoing since well before Boehler got in the game. Indeed, the first hostage release was negotiated in November 2023, nearly 16 months ago. Apparently Boehler was busy at the time with his Nashville investment firm and wasn’t reading the newspaper.
And: It is a bad offer. The hudna play, in which Hamas offers a temporary truce so it can draw up an Oct. 7-style truce-breaking extravaganza, is quite literally the oldest trick in Hamas’s playbook. It’s the Mideast version of a strange man rolling up in a windowless van and offering a lollipop. That’s not an opening bid; it’s the opening scene to a paint-by-numbers horror flick.
Asked about the experience of negotiating with bloodthirsty monsters, Boehler said that rather than focus on how evil Hamas is, it’s better “to realize that every piece of a person is a human and to identify with the human elements of those people and then build from there.” Just what we needed: Barney the Dinosaur negotiating with modern-day Nazis.
Can Boehler at least understand why the Israelis are unnerved by this? Yes, Boehler says, but “we’re the United States. We’re not an agent of Israel.”
It was an astonishing and shameful thing to say, not only because it plays into tropes about Jewish manipulation but because Boehler’s way of negotiating with Hamas has been to make Israeli concession offers without Israel’s say-so. In an move that Boehler, who is himself Jewish, should recognize by its Yiddish name—chutzpah—he started throwing out numbers of Palestinian prisoners Israel would release in exchange for the deal Boehler was offering.
All the U.S. can really offer Hamas is that it will put pressure on Israel not to take certain military actions. Trump and Witkoff have been diligent about stressing the fact that they will give Israel the green light to obliterate Hamas should Hamas sink a deal. There must be a credible threat of force to back up the proffering of concessions. But that threat is a threat of Israeli force.
It’s tempting to worry that Hamas will jump at the chance to accept a version of what Boehler is offering. But his offer doesn’t actually exist; it disintegrated into the air around it as soon as it was spoken. Trump is fickle, but this deal would make the president a laughingstock and would guarantee a return to war, which Trump is keen to avoid. Hamas knows all this.
The near-universal condemnation of Boehler’s Sunday bumbling should send this underdeveloped prospect back to the minor leagues. He did some college program with Jared Kushner, though, so he might have protektsia. But in the meantime, his mess will add some delay to the proceedings because he has given Hamas an opportunity to make ridiculous demands and try to reset the terms of the debate. He has already wasted everyone’s time—and when it comes to the hostages wasting away in Hamas’s torture dungeons, every minute counts. But, hey, at least Adam Boehler got to go on a lot of talk shows!
