Trump wants to 'take over' Gaza and force millions of Palestinians out? It's maniacal. | Opinion
How does 'America should own Gaza, and we'll use the military to get it if we have to!' jibe with Trump's cherished 'America first!' promises?
When I saw President Donald Trump standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying the United States should own Gaza and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” my first thought was: Well, the old wretch’s cheese has finally slid off his saltine.
But then, as I digested Tuesday night’s despicable, inhumane comments – which amounted to a U.S. president proposing some mild ethnic cleansing to create seaside resorts – I wondered if perhaps it’s all just chaos theater, an attempt to distract us from his administration’s swift destruction of our government.
Neither option is good, of course.
Trump's talk of owning Gaza is as inhumane as it is bonkers
We either have a mad-as-a-hatter president who is seriously saying he wants to clear 2 million human beings from Palestinian land and give them “a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land,” adding: “It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return.”
Or we have a president who would hurl a rhetorical grenade like that into the already volatile Middle East – proposing something that would likely violate the Geneva Conventions – as a cynical ploy to keep Americans from noticing the wackadoodle billionaire Trump has enlisted to gut the federal workforce.
No matter which way you slice it, it’s all insane.
Sorry, I thought we were 'America first.' Not 'let's own Gaza first.'
How does “America should own Gaza, and we’ll use the military to get it if we have to!” jibe with Trump’s cherished “America first!” promises?
Why did Trump campaign on lowering food prices and inflation only to get into office and have tech-billionaire Elon Musk almost instantly dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose staffers around the globe were told Tuesday they're about to be put on leave?
I don’t recall a campaign rally where Trump said, “I will ignore the Constitution and recklessly dissolve an entire government agency without congressional approval, and I’ll do it in a way that will cost the government tens of million of dollars!”
Yeah, I definitely would have remembered that.
As The Associated Press reported: The United States "spends less than 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, a smaller share of its budget than some countries. Health programs like those credited with helping end polio and smallpox epidemics and an acclaimed HIV/AIDS program that saved more than 20 million lives in Africa already have stopped. So have monitoring and deployments of rapid-response teams for contagious diseases such as an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.
"Hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medication already delivered by U.S. companies are sitting in ports because of the administration’s sudden shutdown of the agency."
Meanwhile Musk is meddling with the government, putting your personal data at risk
Musk, the unelected billionaire now playing fast and loose with our personal data and busting up the government in an almost certainly illegal way, bragged on social media: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
Cool! Also … what? Who the hell asked for this, and why is your boss talking about forcing a mass of humanity to relocate to a yet-to-be-named “land” so he can launch the Trump-branded Gaza Reconstruction Project?
Trump sounds like the Mad King he wants to be. It's dangerous.
Listen to this absolute babble the actual president of the United States unleashed during Tuesday’s news conference while standing next to the prime minister of Israel and, presumably, being taken seriously: “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places, with plenty of money in the area, that's for sure, I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza.”
What in the actual (expletive) is this guy talking about? It is, objectively, madness.
Republicans, of course, are just letting Trump wreck things
And the Republicans who backed Trump are just sitting there letting it all happen. They’re either thrilled to see the U.S. government get disemboweled by a rich man-child acting like he has a new toy to break, or they hope to get their beaks wet at Trump’s new Gaza vacation properties, or both.
Or maybe they’re all just too spineless to raise a hand and suggest that Dear Leader consider dialing the crazy back 70% or so.
I’ll repeat my earlier assertion: This is insane. What’s unfolding right now with Musk’s government evisceration is a constitutional crisis, and what’s happening with Mad King Trump on the international stage is wildly dangerous and outright maniacal.
So whether Trump is trying to distract us or whether he’s serious and actually as deluded as he sounds doesn’t really matter. We should be focused on all of it, because all of it matters. A lot.
What’s happening right now isn’t what anybody voted for. And it should all make every reasonable American – however few may remain – mad as hell.
Follow Paste BN columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk