President Donald Trump s misleading presentation of himself as a peace candidate has gained some traction with the American public, with even Democrats offering little pushback to his latest bid to promote that idea, new HuffPost/YouGov polling indicates.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans have heard that Trump helped forge agreements between Israel and two Arab states that previously refused to recognize that U.S. ally, according to the poll. A third of Democrats back those deals.

This could be good news for a president who insists hes a peacemaker in spite of his actual national security record , which features a massive troop deployment to the Middle East, brutal U.S. interventions in places like Yemen and Somalia , a disdain for diplomacy and frequent fantasies about inflicting violence abroad.

The deals with Israel that Trump helped broker, which his team refers to in grandiose and quasi-biblical terms as the Abraham Accords, give the presidents supporters an apparent win to cite thats less complicated to explain than his other policies, like ongoing negotiations to withdraw the U.S. from Afghanistan. Trump has tried to summarize those plans in simple promises that he is almost certain to break, like pledging this week that all American troops will return from Afghanistan by Christmas.

Trumps advisers see the Mideast accords as politically useful, particularly with Jewish Americans and evangelical Christians for whom Israel is a top concern. To some extent, the HuffPost/YouGov results vindicate that thinking, showing the deals can have cross-partisan appeal: its rare for just 15% of Democrats to disagree with a Trump policy.

Foreign policy is rarely a decisive factor in U.S. presidential elections; these days, its seldom mentioned in campaign materials and surveys that are dominated by concerns about the coronavirus pandemic and its economic toll. The polling indicates that even Americans who have heard about the agreements are unaware of all of the particulars. Only 15% of Americans said they had heard a lot about Trumps Middle East deals. Their reactions to the agreements were split largely between approval and uncertainty: 49% said they believed the deals to establish diplomatic relations were a good thing, with 41% saying they werent sure what to make of them and just one-tenth viewing the development as a bad thing. Thirty percent said the agreements made the prospect of war in the Middle East less likely, with 14% saying it made it more likely, 21% that it had little effect on the likelihood of war, and the rest that they were unsure.

The deals gave Israel diplomatic ties with the leaders in Abu Dhabi and Manama for the first time. U.S. and Israeli officials argue they create the possibility of Israeli relations with other Middle Eastern countries, most of which say a relationship is contingent on an Israeli settlement with the Palestinians. But they skirt around the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and other key sources of regional tension like the enmity between U.S. partners and Iran.

Trump has pledged that at least five or six countries will sign similar deals, bolstering Israels position in a Muslim-majority region where its an outlier and has repeatedly fought wars with its neighbors. His son-in-law Jared Kushner asked Saudi Arabia, which is close to the Trump administration, to do so, but the kingdoms leadership felt that was impossible, the Wall Street Journal reported , because of the sympathy for the Palestinians and the ultra-orthodox understanding of Islam that remain common among many powerful Saudis.

At present, U.S. officials are pressuring Sudan to agree to its own version of the Abraham Accords prior to the November election, dangling promises of aid.