DOHA, Qatar — A top adviser to the highest levels of the Qatari government told Breitbart News on Sunday evening here at the Doha Forum it was a Breitbart News interview with the Prime Minister of Qatar at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) back in September that helped President Donald Trump land the deal that produced the ceasefire in Gaza that brought home the remaining living Israeli hostages from Hamas.
“It was your interview that got the greatest headline on that issue,” Dr. Majed bin Mohammed al-Ansari, a top adviser to Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, said in response to a question from Breitbart News at a roundtable with journalists from across the international media here at the closing of the conference. “If it wasn’t for President Trump, we wouldn’t have gotten the ceasefire we have right now.”
In particular, al-Ansari is referring to an interview that Breitbart News did with Al Thani, the Qatari Prime Minister, at the UNGA in New York City back in September. The headline of that interview was: Exclusive — Qatari Prime Minister: Donald Trump Is ‘Only One’ in the World Who Can Achieve Peace in Gaza.
Trump clearly read the story, as he later shared it on Truth Social. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also shared the article on social media and several other White House officials pushed it as well.
At the time of that interview, the Gaza deal had not yet been finalized. Qatar and Israel were both still dealing with the fallout from Israel’s decision to bomb Doha to attack Hamas officials who were based here—at the request originally of the U.S. and Israeli governments—for the mediation talks. Israel faced significant blowback throughout the Arab world from that decision to bomb Doha, and Trump even forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to phone Al Thani to apologize for the decision. Trump has repeatedly made clear the U.S. did not know that Israel was doing that, and that the U.S. did not approve of Israel’s decision. This topic still dominates discussion in Qatar, and was a major part of the Qatari prime minister’s interview this weekend at the Doha Forum with Tucker Carlson.
In that clearly consequential interview, Al Thani told Breitbart News that the entire world was looking to Trump as the only person who could rein in Netanyahu and end the war in Gaza. He mentioned a meeting Trump held with Arab leaders on the sidelines of the UNGA, calling it “very important.”
“I believe that the meeting with the Arab and Muslim leaders that took place with President Trump was a very important meeting,” Al Thani said in the interview at the time. “It was a very important event during the UNGA. Basically, the main purpose of that is to highlight for the president the danger for the region and that we need to put a stop to what Israel is doing. Basically, it’s not only jeopardizing the security of the region, it’s jeopardizing even the U.S. interests in the region and jeopardizing the partnerships that the U.S. has built throughout decades in that region. The president was very receptive. He listened to all the leaders and he wants to work together with them to find a solution to this and put an end to it. We believe that everything should start with Gaza — stopping the war in Gaza and build out from there — because if you look at it today Israel and Netanyahu, it’s not the entire country but it’s Netanyahu, is setting the stage for the region that he has no boundaries and no red lines. He will do whatever he wants wherever he wants.”
Al Thani also called out Israel in that interview for bombing Doha, and again said that Trump is the “only one” in the world who could succeed in this regard. As Breitbart News reported at the time:
Asked if he means that Trump has the power to succeed here unlike anyone else, Al Thani simply replied: “Yes. He’s the President of the United States.”
Within days of the UNGA and the Breitbart News interview with the Qatari Prime Minister there, both Israel and Hamas signed onto Trump’s historic Gaza peace plan. The plan makes Trump the “Chairman of the Board of Peace,” locked in a ceasefire, and brought home the remaining Israeli hostages that Hamas held in Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel which started the war in Gaza. Trump visited the Middle East to welcome home the hostages, and Vice President JD Vance also traveled to Israel in October to work to hold the deal together. The nascent deal is still coming into implementation, an understandable situation given the complexity and severity of the situation which dates back decades long before the latest conflict since Oct. 7, 2023.
Despite the roadblocks and hurdles that remain in arguably the most complicated foreign policy arena in the world in decades—Israeli-Palestinian relations have haunted world leaders for generations—regardless of whatever happens from here it’s quite clear that if Trump had not done what he has done so far the Israeli hostages who have been released would still be imprisoned.
Interestingly, a cohort back in the United States led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in terms of lawmakers and by a series of influencers and conservative media personalities has been breaking with Trump when it comes to working with Qatar on such mediation issues. As the president pursues an agenda worldwide of peace deals, he has asked the Qatari government to help with mediation in places like Gaza but also in other conflicts around the world including the recently finalized agreements between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and many other deals. These forces of globalism back in the United States seek to sever U.S. and Qatari ties, and this conversation has similarly dominated the gathering here in Qatar’s capital this weekend.
But there is an even deeper political fight happening than the surface-level fight over whether the U.S. should work with Qatar. Most of the people pushing these questions are aligning, like they have in past recent presidential elections in the GOP primaries, against Trump and Vance ahead of the 2028 election in seemingly trying to push a foreign policy that more closely aligns with the bipartisan failures of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama pasts than what Trump has ushered in during his two terms in the White House. Many of the people who tried to push Cruz over Trump in the primary, and later tried to undermine Trump’s return to the White House by promoting people like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are out in full force on this matter, essentially kicking off the 2028 GOP presidential primary fight early.
At the end of the annual Doha Forum, which saw several senior Trump administration officials including U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker as well as the president’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. and others like Trump political adviser Alex Bruesewitz come and appear on panels and in discussions, Al-Ansari spoke to journalists in an on-record roundtable at the famed Sheraton Grand Doha Resort and Convention Hotel. More than a dozen assembled journalists from around the world heard Al-Ansari say all of these things to Breitbart News—many of them questioned him on other topics like more specifics on how things are moving forward in Gaza—at the roundtable where he took questions for more than half an hour.
The Sheraton has emerged as a destination for peace talks held in Qatar on a number of fronts, dating back years, and the last time Breitbart News was here was with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in September 2020 when he visited to help negotiate the end of the war in Afghanistan. Trump and his team back at the end of his first term in the White House had reached an agreement with the Taliban and the now-defunct Afghan government to do so, but then when now-former President Joe Biden swept into the White House, Biden screwed the whole thing up and it ended up leading to the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that saw the Taliban completely take over the country and the eventual bombing of Abbey Gate at the then-named Hamid Karzai International Airport (when the Taliban took over, they renamed it the Kabul International Airport). During Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump sat with Breitbart News at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, for a more-than-three-hourlong interview in August 2021 where he told Breitbart News even before the Abbey Gate bombing that it was the “single most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.” This would quickly become a rallying cry among Americans clamoring to have Trump back in the White House, and a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign to return in 2024. Trump obviously won the election, defeating then-Vice President Kamala Harris–who Democrats scrambled to install as a fill-in candidate after Biden flopped badly in a debate that awakened the Democrats and establishment media in America to what everyone else could plainly see which was his ailing health.
Al-Ansari, in his comments to Breitbart News in the press availability here at the Doha Forum, said he frequently reminds Americans of how during Trump’s first administration the Qataris were helping with those talks over Afghanistan right here in this place. He said that the long-running efforts show Qatari confidence in Trump’s peacemaking abilities.
“I have to remind my American friends every time we meet that we broke off with President Trump in the last episode by signing another peace agreement between the Taliban and the United States that ended the longest war in U.S. history,” Al-Ansari said. “So, we believe in President Trump’s capacity to produce peaceful results. We’ve seen that happen. We were a party to it. We were in the room. We were mediating peace deals that President Trump did. This administration has been able to accomplish two ceasefires between Hamas and Israel out of three that we got in this war.”
Al-Ansari said this time around, with Trump’s return to the White House, the cooperation between Trump officials and Qataris is deeper than ever. He pointed to Trump’s state visit to Qatar earlier this year as well as how Trump stopped to refuel at Al-Udeid Air Base—the largest U.S. military base outside the United States anywhere on planet earth—where he also met with the Amir and Prime Minister during a trip en route to east Asia. He also said the president and his team have regularly dispatched senior Trump administration officials to Doha consistently all year.
“It’s this administration that got us … deals everywhere else,” Al-Ansari said. “We are heavily involved with the administration in so many files right now that I can’t even keep count. President Trump personally, as you know, has paid a visit to Qatar. A lot of the discussion was on these peace deals that can be accomplished—and another discussion on Air Force One, that was similar topics. U.S. officials have been coming here to Doha periodically, almost every month.”
Just weekend at the Doha Forum, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent at least two U.S. Ambassadors—Barrack and Whitaker—and Al-Ansari mentioned how regularly senior Trump administration official Steve Witkoff has been here in the country as well for mediation efforts.
“Of course, you look at the U.S. delegation, you look at Tom Barrack and the other U.S. officials who are here,” Al-Ansari said. “They are having the discussions here that are conducive to Qatar when it comes to peacemaking. What is the file that Tom Barrack is responsible for? He is working on peace in the Levant. What is Steve Witkoff doing? He is doing Russia-Ukraine and the Iran and the Palestinian issue. Same goes for other officials. Mostly, the officials we interact with on a daily basis are involved in some kind of conflict resolution one way or the other. The president said it very clearly: He wants to end wars and he wants to end up with the largest number of wars ended by any president in U.S. history. He’s on the road to do that. We’re very happy to be in the boat while he’s doing that. He is heavily involved with us in doing that.”
Al-Ansari also directly responded to the critics of Qatar in American influencer circles, saying they are not pushing out “facts” and that the results of Qatar’s work with the American government—again at Trump’s very clear direction—speak for themselves. He again reiterated how Trump himself has asked for Qatari assistance in these matters.
“All of this campaign against Qatar in the United States by some media outlets and some media figures, it’s not stating the facts,” Al-Ansari said. “I could go on and on about how terrible I think a lot of the things that have been said about my country are, but the facts speak for themselves. The hostages are now back with their families as a result of Qatar mediation. The peace deals that have went on … like Colombia and other places, are a result of Qatar mediation. The relationship between Qatar and the U.S. is a strategic alliance that spans more than 40 years. It has been expedited by conflict in the sense that our ability to help with solving many of these conflicts was the main reason why every U.S. administration coming in to the White House within a couple of months picked up the phone and asked us to help on the topic. This administration is even more involved than others when it comes to picking up the phone and saying ‘hey, we have a conflict here or there, and we need your help.’”
So, again, interestingly, the critics of all of this are quite clearly breaking with the president and his administration—which they are more than welcome to do—but people like Cruz have spent the weekend claiming they support the president when they clearly do not.
But the amazing thing about all of this is that these folks seem to undermine their own purported cause of supporting Israel, In his own separate exclusive interview with Breitbart News back in February during his first visit to Washington during Trump’s second term, Netanyahu told Breitbart News that he was excited to end the war in Gaza and that Trump’s ideas for the Gaza Strip were unique and the likeliest to get to a resolution.
“I think President Trump’s vision is the first original idea to solve this problem once and for all,” Netanyahu told Breitbart News at the time, commenting on Trump’s ideas for rebuilding Gaza. “Everybody who knocks it down is doing it first on false premises. The president never said he has to send American soldiers to finish off Hamas—we’re going to do it. Nobody else has to do it. Secondly, he didn’t say he would invest American government money on it because he thinks there will be enough support from countries in the Middle East and probably business sources too. Third, he didn’t talk about forced eviction, but what he’s talking about is giving Gazans a choice. They can live in this demolition dump where they’re indoctrinated all the time to go and fight and destroy Israel. Or they can have an option for a better life with being relocated and having Gaza cleared up and the demolition of thousands and thousands of unexploded bombs. What’s wrong with that? It’s a compelling vision to solve the problem when nothing else has worked.”
While not everything that Trump floated back then made it into the final ceasefire deal signed between Hamas and Israel now some nine or so months later, it was clearly the beginning of the framework that eventually materialized. So basically the Israelis, Qataris, Americans, and more are in line with what Trump is doing—as is much of the rest of the world—and it’s only a handful of anti-Trump globalists who represent a loud minority on the right back in the United States that are somehow fighting Trump here. This is all going to make 2028 one heck of a debate and a campaign.