The Trump Gaza City Hotel and Casino

The second Trump presidency will be unlike the first Trump presidency in many ways, but not every way. He’s still the same guy. Just older, meaner, and browner.

And so, if you hire him to do a job, you should expect him to stand up at a press conference from time to time and propose solutions to major problems that amount to injecting oneself with disinfectant.

On Tuesday we had our first true “shooting bleach” moment of his second term.

To be clear, he didn’t mean that America should merely assist Israel or its Sunni frenemies in reconstructing Gaza. He’s envisioning full-blown annexation of the Gaza strip by the United States, a “long-term ownership position” in Realtor-speak. There’s no reason that a seaside territory on the Mediterranean couldn’t one day become “the Riviera of the Middle East,” he mused, a luxury destination for all of “the world’s people.”

What about the 2 million Palestinians who live there, reporters asked? They should be relocated to “a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land,” the president replied. When pressed on how many he imagined displacing, he said, “All of them … I don’t think they’re going to tell me no.” Nor did he rule out using the U.S. military to accomplish the task. How could he? Other departments that might plausibly have led the effort are being downsized or dismantled altogether. He might have no choice.

Sitting there listening to him, I saw a dystopian tableau vivant in my mind’s eye of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos betting billions on baccarat at the new Trump Gaza City Hotel and Casino while suicide bombs detonate sporadically outside. Of all the “inject bleach” moments we’ve endured since 2015, this may well have been the bleach-iest.

It was so off the wall that even the most broken, servile Republicans in Congress felt moved to (very politely) object. “We’ll see what the Arab world says, but you know, that’d be problematic at many, many levels,” a tactful Sen. Lindsey Graham declared. “A few kinks in that slinky” is how Sen. Thom Tillis described Trump’s plan, which was funny both as a metaphor and as a minor show of bravado from a contemptible wimp who folds like an accordion every time the MAGA base raises an eyebrow at him.

If Trump tells Tillis to vote yes on annexing Gaza, rest assured that Tillis will vote yes on annexing Gaza.

I find myself feeling more ambivalent about Trump’s proposal—or, rather, his willingness to articulate such a proposal—than regular readers might expect, though. What is the downside of humoring him for this little bit of time?

A rat’s nest.

I mean, he’s obviously not serious. I think.

One way he differs from every other president of my lifetime is that sometimes he just says stuff and no one, including some of his own aides, knows whether he means it or not. With good reason: Understanding his motives requires untangling a rat’s nest of strategic considerations, “dark triad” personality traits, anger-control issues, and insatiable avarice, all of it soaked in the logic of populist propaganda in which he’s constantly dousing himself.

So take your pick. “The U.S. should own Gaza” could be a carefully formulated opening gambit in a Middle East peace negotiation. Or, as Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy speculated, it could be a devious red herring designed to distract Americans from whatever the hell Elon Musk is doing to the government. Or it could be an emotional reaction to footage of Hamas’ atrocities on October 7, which Trump was supposed to have watched this week. Or it could be an idea he picked up from his daily scroll through Infowars. Or it could be the sprout from a seed that was planted in his head by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, about how valuable Gaza’s “waterfront property” might be.

Once a property developer, always a property developer.

Maybe Trump said it to spite America’s Sunni allies, who were quick to dismiss his recent call for relocating Gazans to neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan. Or maybe he said it for no better reason than that he is and forever will be a troll at heart and this was his way of trolling the planet. When his buddy Elon wants to scandalize millions for laughs, he gives Nazi salutes; when the leader of the free world wants to do so, he casually proposes flipping the geopolitical chessboard of the entire Middle East.

So he probably wasn’t serious. And even if he was, he can usually (although not always) be dissuaded from his most destructively stupid ideas by “market signals.” My guess is that he fully intended to follow through on his ridiculous trade war with Canada and Mexico—until he got spooked by Monday’s insta-selloff and pulled back in return for a handful of magic beans to let him save face.

The same thing, sort of, happened after his Gaza proposal on Tuesday. His friends in Riyadh were alarmed enough that they woke up early and put out a statement reaffirming that there will be no peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel without the creation of a Palestinian state. That might be enough to get Trump to back down. And if he does, there’ll have been no downsides to Tuesday’s nonsense.

Well … maybe a few downsides.

A loose cannon.

One immediate downside to mouthing off right now about a Palestinian-free Gaza is that the cretins who’ve ruled the strip for the better part of 20 years still hold the lives of Israeli hostages in their hands.

The second phase of talks between Israel and Hamas about freeing the remaining captives has just begun and some families fear the president’s provocation might cause them to collapse. The father of one Israeli soldier who was killed on October 7 and whose body is still being held by Hamas sounds nervous. “We want to remind Trump and Netanyahu that human lives are at stake,” he told a local newspaper, “and we need to return them as a top priority, and only after that if we want to make changes.”

Another downside, to which the Saudis’ statement alludes, is that it’ll be much harder to convince Muslims around the region to accept peace with Israel if that peace comes packaged with a second nakba. Pushing the Palestinian population out of Gaza to create a beachfront playground for international jet-setters frankly sounds like an over-the-top progressive satire of “settler-colonialist” rapaciousness.

Even some U.S. allies in Europe moved quickly to denounce Trump’s proposal on Tuesday, no doubt jittery about how their Muslim populations might receive the news. Global civil strife is a steep price to pay for the president’s incorrigible impulse toward trolling.

A third downside is that openly aspiring to annex another people’s territory gives the United States no leg to stand on in criticizing China for eyeing Taiwan or Russia for eyeing Ukraine. In fact, Trump’s intentions are arguably more depraved than theirs are. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin could talk our ears off about the strategic imperatives of controlling their respective near-abroads and the historical kinship between their countries and those they’re aiming to “reunite” with. All Trump can say to justify depopulating Gaza is that it might make a hell of a resort.

But hey: If it bums you out to see the president of the United States legitimizing the imperial ambitions of authoritarian degenerates, look on the bright side. He already crossed that bridge when he squeezed Denmark about turning over Greenland. At this point, the marginal cost of encouraging great-power conquests by adding Gaza to the wish list is minimal.

The biggest and most obvious downside of fantasizing about a new “Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, though, is that following through on it would amount to, er, ethnic cleansing. It’s not ethnic cleansing of the “round everyone up and shoot them in the woods” variety that the Nazis practiced, but forcible removal would be a war crime and a crime against humanity under international law. The president of the United States has now formally endorsed population transfer on a massive scale.

And while, realistically, the U.S. military won’t ever be involved in shipping out Palestinians to destinations unknown, it’s not as unlikely that the Israeli military will be. By proposing the cleansing of Gaza, Trump just gave cover to the most radically nationalist elements in Israeli politics to push hard for annexing the territory. Naturally those elements are thrilled that he’s done so, with some viewing it as a “green light” to occupy the strip and begin building settlements there, per Axios.

It might not just be Gaza that’s in the crosshairs either. Certain Republican supporters of Israel in Congress have introduced legislation that would require U.S. agencies to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” in line with Israeli settlers’ claims that that land also belongs to the Jewish state. When Trump was asked a few days ago if he supported Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, the New York Times noted, he wouldn’t answer directly.

As near as I can tell, then, it’s now official U.S. policy that a two-state solution is impossible and that Israel should feel free to lean into aggressive irredentism toward Palestinian territory. Which seems … destabilizing.

But maybe that’s an upside too?

A bad status quo.

There are a few upsides to the idea of a Trump Gaza City Hotel and Casino, actually.

Some are petty, I admit. For instance, it’s gratifying to see pro-Palestinian U.S. voters reap what they sowed by rallying behind an autocratic sleaze like Trump on Election Day in the name of punishing the Biden administration for supporting the war in Gaza. They were warned at the time that their candidate of choice would side with Israel far more decisively than Kamala Harris would. They ignored those warnings and voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party anyway. Now their faces are being consumed.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

It’s also immensely enjoyable to see Trump tie his own supporters up in knots by rolling an ideological grenade like “let’s take over Gaza” into the MAGA tent. It’s almost lab-designed to confound “America First” foreign policy dogma. A populist movement that’s spent 10 years screeching about pulling back abroad militarily and “ending endless wars,” particularly in the Middle East, suddenly finds itself obliged to cheer the idea of the U.S. inserting itself into the most endless Middle Eastern war of all.

And not for any ol’ reason. For the sake of … nation-building.

It feels like a prank, as if Trump considered the right-wing condemnation of Biden’s “Gaza pier” last year and thought it’d be amusing to see how the same people would react to him turning the dial all the way up to a full-blown American occupation of the territory. Some supporters responded predictably, either by instantly converting to imperialism or slobbering aimlessly about his genius. Some, like his secretary of state, echoed his desire to “Make Gaza Beautiful Again” while being careful not to endorse the proposed mechanism.

And a few stood on principle. Sen. Lindsey Graham remembered what happened the last time the U.S. sent troops to help keep the peace between Israel and its enemies. Sen. Rand Paul, an isolationist, complained that he couldn’t get the circle to square. “I thought we voted for America First,” he wrote. “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers’ blood.”

I dunno, Rand. “America First” movements have always had a soft spot for ethnic cleansing and conquest.

It’s all very funny. But, snark aside, there might be a genuine virtue to Trump’s Gaza proposal: Destabilizing a conflict that’s been miserably stable for both sides for decades needn’t be a bad thing.

Trump’s greatest political talent is moving the so-called Overton window that defines what’s politically possible. He did it in 2016, he did it on January 6, he’s doing it again right now by carving chunks off of the constitutional order. Meanwhile, the great stumbling block to a resolution between Israel and the Palestinians is the latter’s insistence on a “right of return” to the land in Israel that their ancestors lost in battle ages ago. Israelis will never agree to share a country with a population that’s been radicalized by generations of war and propaganda into supporting fanatic irredentism and homicidal antisemitism, and why should they? The very idea of it is preposterous. It’s a complete nonstarter.

Yet, because Palestinians refuse to accept that reality, the Overton window has been stuck on the right of return for decades.

If (and it’s a big if!) Trump jars the Overton window by introducing the equally preposterous idea of a U.S. takeover of Gaza, maybe some degree of reality about the right of return will begin to set in. This is the “opening gambit in a Middle East peace negotiation” theory of his motivations that I described earlier: In return for America agreeing to drop its designs on the strip, recognizing the Palestinians’ claim to that territory, and assisting in Gaza’s reconstruction, perhaps Palestinian leaders will at last renounce the right of return.

Or, if that’s still too much to ask at a moment when Hamas has been pummeled and Hezbollah pulverized (if not now, when?), maybe his plan will at least spook Israel’s Sunni neighbors into taking a greater role in Gaza. A Dispatch colleague suggested last night that regional anger at the prospect of American troops pushing out Palestinians might be so destabilizing that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, and so on will feel obliged to do something to avert it. We will not allow the noble people of Gaza to be deprived of their land again so we’re sending peacekeepers there to keep the U.S.—and Hamas, by the way—out.

An outcome in which friendly-ish Arab powers are in charge of Gaza’s security instead of one of the most depraved jihadist outfits on Earth isn’t a terrible one for the U.S. and Israel.

And so here I am, somehow defending (half-heartedly) the nuttiest “injecting bleach” moment Trump has ever had because it might disrupt an untenable status quo, wittingly or not. I feel as clammy in doing that as you might assume, but I’m also modest enough to give him a small benefit of the doubt on subjects that I suspect he grasps better than I do. Middle East politics is one of them: Because the president speaks “authoritarian brute” as his native language, he may have superior insight into how to get entities like Hamas, the Saudis, and the Iranians to bend to America’s will. Who am I to lecture a ruthless predator on how to influence ruthless predators?

If his dopey “let’s take Gaza” ploy ends up keeping Hamas out of Gaza and bringing the Saudis and Israelis together, he might just deserve that Nobel he’s been craving. With Trump, as with the Middle East, hope for the best and expect the worst.