WASHINGTON — For the last 20 living Israeli hostages who spent 738 awful days in captivity — starved, isolated and afraid — the worst nightmare is behind them. “The war is over,” President Donald Trump told Politico’s Dasha Burns on Air Force One as they flew to the Middle East ahead of the signing of the ceasefire deal he brokered. “It’s over. You understand that?”

Four deceased hostages also were transferred Monday; 24 bodies that were supposed to go home Monday remain with their Hamas captors.

The day must have been sweet for President Donald Trump. He and his band of disruptors were supposed to be world-class bunglers on the global stage, amateurs who could not hold a candle to the establishment foreign policy dons who worked for seasoned hands like President Joe Biden.

Remember how insiders mocked Trump’s real-estate developer picks to corral the Middle East — son-in-law Jared Kushner and special enjoy Steve Witkoff — because they lacked international-community credentials?

The two businessmen look pretty good these days at a job for which they never trained. It turns out that sometimes you get more done by turning to people who don’t know the long list of things that, in the realm of realpolitik, cannot be done.

Team Trump “shook up the chess board,” Dan Senor, one-time chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, told CNN, when he demanded that the remaining hostages be released all at once. “I thought this will never happen,” Senor confessed.

Didn’t we all?

“The transformation of Donald Trump,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies Executive Director Jonathan Schanzer told me, has been a journey. Not long ago, the conventional wisdom was that Trump would be a one-term president. Now in his second term in the White House, he can claim the mantle of a peacemaker.

Trump doesn’t speak from a high horse. Instead, he talks about what works and what does not. His message to Muslim-majority nations: “Decades of fomenting terrorism and extremism, jihad-ism and antisemitism have not worked.”

This approach, I believe, is part of the reason Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif used the summit to join other world leaders in supporting that Trump’s desire to win next year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

That suggestion sends New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd over the edge. Trump will never “get his short stubby fingers” on the coveted prize, she wrote. It doesn’t matter if he should succeed in delivering peace to the Middle East, she argued. He’s not worthy because he trolls on social media and he “is siccing American troops on blue cities.”

For two years, many Americans have watched the Gaza war and suspected that this was a conflict that would never end in peace. Then Trump came along, determined to get both sides to yes, and peace appears as a possibility. Peace also means that Trump could end his time in office with the legacy as a world peacemaker — who relied on two real estate developers.

One of the things I love about covering politics: the surprises.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.