Trump Whisperers. How foreign leaders sweet-talk Trump
By Adam Taylor May 2 at 12:59 AM
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech Monday that Iran lied about the history of its nuclear weapons program, the event was broadcast to millions. But it probably had an intended audience of one: President Trump.
Israeli journalist Barak Ravid reported Tuesday that Netanyahu briefed the American leader on the files two months ago. According to one Israeli official who spoke to Ravid, the decision to publicly release the information was specifically timed to influence Trump as he approaches the May 12 deadline on whether to reimpose sanctions on Iran and probably kill the nuclear deal struck with Tehran in 2015.
Many world leaders have tried to influence Trump since he entered office last year, but Netanyahu knew his audience better than most. An experienced prop user, the Israeli leader brought out a number of visual cues during his presentation, including a cabinet full of binders and compact discs supposedly holding 100,000 documents on Iran's nuclear program. An accompanying slideshow hammered home the point in stark terms: “Iran lied.”
Link to tweet
Experts were not impressed. Joshua Pollack of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey wrote that almost all the information Netanyahu presented was already known. The only fresh tidbit, Pollack wrote for Defense One, was that Iran had envisaged only a “minuscule, unambitious” nuclear arsenal of low-yield weapons that would “make Kim Jong Un giggle.” But Netanyahu wasn't aiming for experts. His visual aids seemed tailor-made for a president whose love of maps and charts is well known. And Trump was clearly paying attention, if not terribly closely: On Monday night, the White House released a statement that mistakenly said Netanyahu had shown that Iran “has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program” (the U.S. government replaced the statement a short while later, quietly acknowledging that Iran's nuclear program was in the past tense).
Netanyahu is not the only world leader doing a good job of influencing U.S. leadership. In South Korea, President Moon Jae-in has overcome numerous ideological differences with his American counterpart to become a key partner in the push to defuse tensions with North Korea. He has followed a strategy similar to Netanyahu's: Rather than trying to win over an entire government with facts and figures, just aim straight for Trump.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/05/02/how-foreign-leaders-sweet-talk-trump/
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