Imagine this unexpected development: A leader often criticized as authoritarian and a threat to American democracy has surprisingly played a pivotal role in fostering peace in the Middle East, even safeguarding the region’s sole democracy.

However, his critics seem reluctant to acknowledge this achievement.

Recent events have highlighted how deeply entrenched opposition to Donald Trump can be. Despite a remarkable week where a monumental effort led to the safe return of 20 hostages, an outcome once deemed impossible just weeks ago, those on the left find it difficult to celebrate this success.

Their unwillingness to recognize President Trump’s significant accomplishment in this instance is evident.

It’s a truly perplexing situation.

Take the staff at the otherwise dying, irrelevant Time magazine, deliberately choosing a terrible photo of Trump, taken from a universally unflattering angle, to memorialize his masterstroke.

‘Yes, it was on purpose,’ a staffer told Daily Mail. ‘We laughed about it.’

Again: legacy media wonders why it’s dying. The Democrats wonder why they keep failing to win hearts and minds.

We now have irrefutable evidence that Trump Derangement Syndrome is more intractable than long COVID (Pictured: Trump posing with signed agreement at peace summit in Egypt)

Take the staff at the otherwise dying, irrelevant Time magazine, deliberately choosing a terrible photo of Trump, taken from a universally unflattering angle, to memorialize his masterstroke

Wither Joaquin Phoenix, Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo – just a few of the 5,000 actors and filmmakers who signed an open letter pledging to boycott the Israeli movie industry?

It should be a matter of simple decency, of basic humanity, to cheer the release of hostages who spent 737 days being beaten, starved, raped and tortured in Gaza.

Especially on the left, whose woke progressives decried the ‘genocide’ taking place in Gaza. You would think they’d celebrate the American president who has finally brought peace to the region and ended said genocide.

You’d think that they’d speak up now as Hamas murder squads openly execute Palestinians – their own people – in the streets of Gaza, as the last remnants of the terror army grasp for control.

No, no and no.

The New York Times, in its physical Tuesday edition, had not one op-ed about the most consequential end to war in our lifetime.

Their headline, above the fold: ‘Hostages and Prisoners Freed with Gaza’s Path Unclear.’

Gaza’s path unclear. Pay attention to this framing: It’s not the end of war, the release of innocent hostages, and a moment the entire world exhaled. No: Gaza’s path is unclear, so let’s all perseverate on the only justifiable outcome when one side executes a terror attack, in scale and scope, that was Israel’s 9/11.

The Times ‘news analysis’ inside the paper, by David E Sanger and Adam Ragson: ‘The Lost Chances to Reach a Cease-Fire and a Hostage Deal.’

If that isn’t the very definition of yesterday’s news.

Another headline, same edition: ‘Cheering Crowds Greet Freed Palestinians, Though Joy is Muted For Some.’

Muted joy? Paging Kamala Harris!

Harris, by the way, is out on her book tour and clearly testing the waters for a 2028 run. But she wouldn’t even call Trump by his name in her statement about the peace deal.

I’ll spare you the unnecessary verbiage and get right to the relevant part of her statement on X: ‘I commend the leaders and partners who made this agreement possible, including the president and his team.’

Imagine if Joe Biden had been the one to broker this. Of course that did not happen — in fact, it’s extremely unlikely that Hamas would have ever gone through with the 10/7 attacks if Trump, rather than Biden, had been in office.

And does anyone think for second that the feckless, weak, incomprehensible Kamala Harris, had she won 2024, would have gotten this done?

Harris, by the way, is out on her book tour and clearly testing the waters for a 2028 run. But she wouldn’t even call Trump by his name in her statement about the peace deal

Wither Joaquin Phoenix, Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo – just a few of the 5,000 actors and filmmakers who signed an open letter pledging to boycott the Israeli movie industry? 

And where is Obama, the self-appointed arbiter of the moral universe?

Yet here we have both former President Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, taking credit for this deal — which only goes to show how incredible they know it is.

They want what some of the Orange Hitler’s got.

Chiming in from another galaxy, Biden wrote that ‘the road to this deal was not easy. My administration worked relentlessly to bring hostages home, to get relief to Palestinian civilians, and end the war.’

If only he had done that when he had the chance.

Blinken issued a similarly churlish, detached-from-reality statement on X, all but patting President Trump on the head for having ‘adopted and built on the plan the Biden administration developed after months of discussion with Arab partners, Israel and the Palestinian authority.’

It’s almost enough to make you forget that Biden was doddering around the White House, sleeping his days away, forgetting that dead colleagues were dead, and was so cognitively addled that his inner circle kept him from his own high-level military and war strategists.

And where is Obama, the self-appointed arbiter of the moral universe?

The name Trump has yet to pass his lip — or his X feed.

As for the bulk of mainstream media — well, it doesn’t surprise.

NBC News took Andrea Mitchell out of the mothballs, where she thanked — on air! — Biden and Blinken for getting this done.

She went further in a reply to Blinken on X.

‘Thank you for spending two years working towards this moment,’ she wrote.

Over at CNN, a network in terminal decline, Christine Amanpour apologized — under duress from execs is my guess — for telling host Kaitlan Collins that the hostages, some of whom were forced to dig their own graves after being starved to skin and bones, ‘were probably being treated better than the average Gazan, because they are the pawns and the chips that Hamas had.’

This is depraved. This is nothing less than institutional rot at the core of left-leaning media, which has learned nothing, nothing, from the rout of 2024.

At the very least, Amanpour should be suspended for that. At least two survivors of Oct 7 — survivors who escaped that day, not hostages — have committed suicide, unable to cope with their PTSD.

Roei Shalev, who was shot that day and survived, killed himself on October 10th — just three days after the second anniversary of the attacks.

He was only 30 years old. He left a suicide note on social media.

‘Please don’t be angry with me, please,’ he wrote. ‘No one will ever understand me, and that’s OK because you can’t understand. I just want this suffering to end. I’m alive, but inside everything is dead.’

President Trump did what Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Antony Blinken could not. And it seemed he understood — far better than the ostensible party of caring and compassion — the very human costs of this war, and the costs to come.

Only one person here deserves credit. And as long as the Dems and their media enablers deny him, they can kiss any hope of 2028 goodbye.