Unless you were asleep for the past 16 hours — and, if so, kudos! — you know this: At a press conference on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump proposed that the U.S. take over Gaza, remove the current inhabitants and turn the area into a beautiful resort, uh, area.
This is not going to happen for lots of reasons — namely that the nearly 2 million people currently living in Gaza are not going to voluntarily leave so that Trump can build a resort community. And the American public, which has grown less and less interested in military entanglements abroad, are NEVER going to go for the idea of using U.S. military force to clear those people out.
But, just because it’s not going to happen doesn’t mean it’s not a telling window into Trump’s psyche and goals for his 2nd term. It is.
In reading the reporting on the announcement, two things jumped out at me:
Trump was reading from a piece of paper when he made the proposal
Aides said he had been thinking about it for the last several months.
Which means this was no off-the-cuff comment that Trump plucked from thin air. This was purposeful.
And, in that, it is revealing.
Because it affirms both what we know about Trump and what we can see are his emerging goals for a 2nd term.
We know that he fancies himself the world’s greatest deal-maker — and that the Middle East, to his mind, is the biggest deal out there. He said as much in a post-2016 election interview with the New York Times:
I would love to be able to be the one that made peace with Israel and the Palestinians. A lot of people tell me, really great people tell me, that it’s impossible — you can’t do it. I disagree. I think you can make peace. I have reason to believe I can do it.
We also know that Trump, who cannot run again, is very interested in his legacy. He wants to be remembered as a consequential president. And, as has become plain in his first few weeks in office, he believes expanding America’s reach in the world — literally — is a path to do just that.
Canada! Greenland! Panama! Gulf of America! “Riviera of the Middle East”!
It all fits into the same bucket.
So, no, I do not think the U.S. is going to become the owner of the Gaza Strip and/or turn it into a resort area.
But the very fact that Trump is thinking seriously about this sort of stuff means that we have not heard the last of his expansionist talk. Not by a long shot.
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