| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, the modern day Gore Vidal of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. On the face of it, you may think it's incredibly unfair for President-elect Donald Trump to swoop in and claim credit for the ceasefire-hostage deal between Israel and Hamas. The guy's not even in office yet! How can "we" have accomplished anything? Or so the thinking goes: But Marc Champion says critics ought to hold their tongue. Trump did impact the outcome, just not in the way you think: "It isn't that he or his foreign policy team came up with a new solution … nor was it Trump's threat to let all hell break loose," he writes. Instead, it's because Trump demanded that a deal must happen right here and now, forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-right cabinet to make a decision: "Play ball, or alienate the most amenable leader to themselves and their goals ever elected to the US presidency." Indeed, a diplomat in the negotiations said the involvement of Trump's team was "the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal." Case in point? Steven Witkoff — the brazen incoming Mideast Envoy — reportedly told Netanyahu's team he expected to ink a deal when he arrived in Israel last week, regardless of it being Shabbat. It's a tough pill to swallow for US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has been tirelessly trying to orchestrate a bargain in Gaza ever since Hamas launched its mass terror campaign in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet Marc has little sympathy for the outgoing administration. Although President Joe Biden was weakened by his lame duck status, he failed to use the most powerful tool in his arsenal: an arms embargo. "We will never know if Netanyahu would have continued the war in Gaza the way he has — long after his generals decided they had achieved all they could militarily — had he known this would cost him the weapons he also needed to succeed against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran," Marc writes. We also will never know how much death and destruction could have been avoided had Israel recalibrated its warpath earlier on. Not one to humblebrag, Trump doubled down on his win on Truth Social this afternoon: "This EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November … We have achieved so much without even being in the White House." If he keeps this up, Marc says he may end up getting that Nobel Peace Prize after all. We'll never hear the end of it. It's Day 2 of the Trump cabinet confirmation hearings, and things are going about as smoothly as you'd expect: Pam Bondi, Trump's nominee for attorney general, was in the hot seat today. Although Elon Musk says she's "an excellent choice," Mary Ellen Klas wonders whether Bondi would "subvert the rule of law" to help Trump pardon Jan. 6 rioters, punish his enemies and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Based on the clips coming out of the hearing, the picture looks murky: Although Bondi promised Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar that "politics will not play a part" in her work if confirmed, she failed to rule out prosecuting Trump's legal foes. When watching Pete Hegseth's four-hour hearing yesterday, Nia-Malika Henderson found many "Republicans were at a loss to explain why someone with Hegseth's thin resume — he mismanaged a couple of tiny nonprofits prior to joining Fox — was qualified to oversee a budget of almost a trillion dollars with 3 million employees." Democrats had no trouble filling in the blanks, though: Sen. Gary Peters pushed Hegseth on his relevant experience to be the top dog at the Pentagon. Sen. Mazie Hirono inquired about his allegations of public drunkenness. And Sen. Elissa Slotkin asked whether he would "stand in the breach" if Trump gave him an illegal order. Nia says Hegseth dodged all three, "insisting he'd been nominated to the role by, in his telling, one of the best CEOs in US history." Nothing like sucking up to the boss!! Are You 18 Years or Older? | You know what? Maybe porn sites don't even need age verification to keep kids away! A pop-up quiz about Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. could be a far more effective barrier to entry: If you're confused about why a Supreme Court justice is talking about Pornhub and Playboy, let me back things up. This morning, the justices heard oral arguments for a case challenging a Texas law that requires sex sites to verify visitors' age. Proponents of the law say it shields children, but members of the adult entertainment industry say it violates First Amendment rights. While Alito's line of questioning makes for a hilarious headline, it also highlights how technology has changed since Ashcroft v. ACLU in 2004, the last time SCOTUS struck down a federal age-verification law. In a new op-ed, Clare Morell and Meg Leta Jones — both amici curiae in the case — say "the court now faces a transformed technological landscape: Protecting kids online has become nearly impossible for parents, while age verification has become simple and anonymous." The numbers behind adolescent exposure to explicit content are atrocious: "73% of teenagers had seen pornography, and more than half had been exposed accidentally. Some 15% of kids said they first saw online pornography at age 10 or younger. The majority had also seen pornography depicting violence: rape, choking or someone in pain," they write. Verification, meanwhile, has gotten a lot less complicated: "The key worry in 2004 was that by requiring users to prove who they were through an ID or a credit card, COPA was discouraging adults from accessing constitutionally protected material. Not having to provide that information would be a lesser burden on their speech," writes Noah Feldman. Today's situation is a lot different. "The solution is to require that states prove that there is anonymizing age verification software that would not reveal one's identity." Still, he fears this particular case won't move the needle: "Texas hasn't proven that. But perhaps, in a future case, another state could." "My whole life was in that house" is a sentence that Los Angeles resident Erika D. Smith has heard more times than she can count in the past week. "Roughly 12,000 homes, businesses and schools have burned to the ground in the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighborhood and in working-class Altadena," she writes, and the balancing act of rebuilding a city in ashes will be onerous. Mark Gongloff says the fires are "exposing a gap between what people thought their homes were worth and what they'll actually get from insurance companies when those houses have been reduced to ash." Sadly, it's a wake-up call that more and more Americans will have to face as climate change reveals our underinsurance nightmare.  Maybe that field trip to Greenland wasn't such a good idea after all: Javier Blas says Trump's obsession with uncovering the ice sheet's bounty of natural resources is a fool's errand. According to a 2023 geological report, prices would need to rise significantly to make Greenlandic deposits economically viable. "Rare earths are a bit of a misnomer — they are quite abundant," Javier explains. "The problem is that rarely are they abundant in a concentration worth mining for." According to the US Geological Survey, Greenland has less than two million tons of the stuff — a fraction of China's stockpile. Trump delights in spreading confusion. It's riskier than he thinks. — Bloomberg editorial board The latest CPI illustrates why it's a particularly tricky time in inflation psychology. — Jonathan Levin Taiwan's military is nowhere near prepared for a Trumpian world. — Karishma Vaswani UK stock market casualties may be cheap, but they'll be slow to recover. — Chris Hughes Keir Starmer's erratic, hype-fueled approach to AI will backfire on Britain. — Parmy Olson Falling fertility will force us to work longer and use AI more frequently. — John Authers Albertsons shouldn't repeat Walmart's mistakes. — Andrea Felsted David Solomon has refocused Goldman, while Jane Fraser is struggling with Citi. — Paul J. Davies How Trump and his allies ran out Jack Smith's clock. — Barbara McQuade Coca-Cola goes full MAGA. The US is banning Red Dye No. 3. TikTok will go *poof* into the night. Vasectomies are all the rage post-Roe. North Korean hackers stage crypto heists. The cyberbully hiding in plain sight. Jean-Georges's $200 million flop. Album variants are everywhere. Movie theaters have a laughing problem. The Weinermobile walked so the Brew Crew could run. (h/t Andrea Felsted) Notes: Please send rare earths and feedback to Jessica Karl at jkarl9@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and find us on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. | 
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