We all saw the news. Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited the U.S., welcomed with the red carpet.
I was in Saudi Arabia just a few years ago and asked several bright young professionals why they liked Donald Trump so much.
“You know he doesn’t like you,” I gently reminded them.
They were all fully aware of Trump’s then numerous derogatory comments about Muslims at the time.
The response to my inquiry was profound and a lesson the left still doesn’t grasp.
“Oh, we all know he’s a clown,” one 30-year-old Saudi lawyer told me. "But we also know that if you make Trump feel important. If you lay out the carpet, shower him with praise, hand him a golden goblet. He’ll do pretty much whatever we ask for."
Every time politicians scold him, he becomes more destructive. It doesn’t matter whether you’re John McCain, George Bush, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton.
You strike him once, he hits back five times.
You ask him a hard question, he’ll call you a name and belittle you tenfold in public. Piggy.
Trump’s adversaries haven’t learned what certain foreign governments mastered early. Middle Eastern leaders figured it out. Eastern European strongmen figured it out. Even North Korea figured it out.
The more you inflate Trump’s narcissism, the more likely he is to take up your cause.
That’s why Kim Jong-un went from threatening missiles to exchanging “love letters.”
It’s why war loving Netanyahu discovered that praising Trump’s statesmanship would unlock whatever he wanted.
It’s why Viktor Orbán learned that a little flattery could turn Trump into a loudspeaker for Hungarian “illiberal democracy.”
It’s why Putin realized that a compliment about Trump’s intelligence would get him defending Russia on national television.
And it’s why every CEO with a ribbon-cutting ceremony got him to pose, smile, and agree to whatever deregulation they wanted.
So if you’re a white supremacist, if you think Jews have space lasers, if you want to round up undocumented brown children, all you have to do is praise Donald Trump and he’ll invite you for lunch at Mar-a-Lago. He’ll greenlight unlimited bombings, he’ll applaud crackdowns, he’ll even say “there’s good people on both sides.”
It’s the same reason Trump could go from demanding a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” (his words) to agreeing to build a joint military training facility in Idaho for Qatar.
Principles of course matter.
But understanding the game of politics matters, too.
Bernie Sanders has preached about income inequality for decades, but his rigid principles have delivered limited structural change. He’ll move on to the next world someday with his principles, but having accomplished very little.
I guarantee that if someone on the left walked into the White House, acknowledged something — anything — Trump thought he did well, they could walk out with a deal that materially improves the issue they care about.
It’s nauseating. But it’s also the truth.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeffrey Kass' work on Medium.