Trump's imperialist acid flashback: Is his Club Gaza dream for real?

You can’t out-think Donald Trump. You can’t think your way around him or through him and get to the other side — there’s no there there. In fact, thinking about Donald Trump is generally a bad idea, like thinking too much about Cthulhu or the Candyman, and should be avoided whenever possible. Didn’t old Fred Nietzsche say something about gazing too long into the abyss?

There is no way to make sense of Trump’s neo-imperialist acid-flashback proposal that the U.S. should take “a long-term ownership position” in Gaza, expel the people who live there and redevelop all that needlessly squandered beachfront real estate as a nightmarish hybrid of Dubai, Las Vegas and Monte Carlo. Trying to puzzle out what he “really” meant, as opposed to what he actually said, will get you nowhere. 

World leaders and political commentators and elected officials face a genuine quandary here: This individual has once again become the actual president of the actual United States, and his words and deeds manifestly have real-world consequences. No one can entirely resist being trolled or seduced or buffaloed or bamboozled by Trump; those are not just his principal talents but the motivating forces of his existence. At best, we can strive for a few moments of Zen-like calm: Remain still as a stone, and allow the Trumpness to flow over you, one foul current in the stream of human consciousness. Name the powerful emotions you feel and set them aside, because unleashing your anger, outrage, disgust and so forth — as, again, with Cthulhu — only nourishes him.

Far too many words have already been expended on treating Trump’s so-called Gaza as something that might actually be attempted, and explaining the many reasons why it isn’t a good idea and wouldn’t work. Isn’t it overly gullible, a bit too Charlie Brown, to plunge into earnest discussion of military blowback and outlandish expense and crimes against humanity? 

Trump himself has already backpedaled on this obscene fantasy while claiming not to, in his own inimitable style. More recently he has insisted that everyone "loves" the idea (which everyone hates) and suggested that Gaza will be "turned over" to the U.S. by Israel at some future date — presumably after the Israelis have finished the job of flattening the place and removing its entire population — but that the U.S. will spend no money there and send no troops. The art of the deal! 

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On the other hand, it seems overly cynical to leap into decoder-ring mode and offer exegetical pronouncements about the brilliant and/or delusional strategy beneath this real estate wet dream. There’s been a lot of that too: It’s a negotiating ploy aimed at Arab leaders, Bibi Netanyahu or both: Get on board my nonexistent peace plan, or the s**t’s really gonna hit the fan! It’s a long-term Trump Organization business plan! It’s designed to make us say, hey, let’s just give this lunatic Greenland and the Panama Canal; maybe that'll shut him up!. It’s vaporware, likely authorized by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles to distract the media thumbsuckers and foreign-policy eggheads while Elon Musk loots the federal treasury!

I mean, all those interpretations seem plausible and most of them are at least a little bit true — but a better way to put it is that they’re all true in different iterations of the Trump multiverse. I said this was an acid flashback! Those approaches all fail to capture or comprehend the quantum nature of Trumpian discourse; he’s like Schrödinger’s cat, stuffed with Burger King and Ozempic. He’s alive and dead, serious and joking, monumentally stupid and a stable genius, all at the same time. 

Trump means everything he says when he says it, sort of: He’s a salesman first and foremost, and temporarily believing your own lies is an important career skill. He’d be delighted if his vision of a Middle East Riviera purged of poor brown people and piled up with craptastic Trump Towers could come to fruition. He’s also willing to refine the idea downward, all the way to zero if necessary, or to deny he ever said it in the first place. 

But the half-baked, semi-apologetic refinements offered by underlings like press secretary Karoline Leavitt or Secretary of State Marco Rubio — maybe Trump didn’t mean that all Palestinians would have to leave forever, or that the U.S. would literally occupy Gaza — are not his style. He’s about the bleach-injecting thought experiment, the hurricane-nuking brain-fart, the future-slicing blue-sky initiative aimed at reshaping the world and creating peace in our time. If those seem like incompatible states of matter, you haven’t been keeping up. 

This is where the deep thinkers of the "anti-anti-Trump" left — my own unfortunate coinage, I believe — run themselves aground trying to enlist our Great Leader as an anti-imperialist ally. Ryan Grim, a reporter whose work I respect in other contexts, expended considerable effort last week on the hypothesis that Elon Musk’s demolition of the federal government might not be a bad thing, given that the “deep state” budget conceals many unsavory policies and practices.

Like the entire anti-anti-Trump enterprise, this relies way too heavily on the stopped-clock premise, and also on the misguided belief that Trump’s supposed opposition to overseas military adventures or empire-building reflects some kind of consistent principle or internal logic. It’s yet another failure to reckon with quantum Trumpness: Trump isn’t "for" or "against" anything, in the normal sense of those words. He has taken Emerson’s nostrum about consistency being “the hobgoblin of little minds” to its acid-flashback extreme: no consistency, no mind to speak of, but one hell of a hobgoblin.

Our president simultaneously inhabits a ruthless Darwinian realm of hard-headed dealmaking and power struggle — which is as close as he comes to understanding the contemporary world — and an early 20th-century coloring book of manifest destiny and boundless American greatness, which Teddy Roosevelt would have found unbearably simplistic. (I’m skipping over the paranoid late-’80s New York City in Trump’s brain, which is always a factor but less directly relevant here.)

Trump would be delighted to conduct foreign wars if they were guaranteed to result in glorious victory and universal acclamation, with homoerotic parades of weeping, muscular white men staged in his honor on a regular basis. He disliked the Iraq war, in retrospect, for failing to live up to those onanistic fantasies. Instead, it was ugly, expensive and embarrassing, and came to represent — for Trump and many other people, in fairness — a disturbingly nonspecific loss of national greatness. 

For this anxiety-ridden couch commander, there’s no contradiction between refusing to be drawn into military interventions in incomprehensible s**thole countries where scary Black and brown people wave Kalashnikovs around, and miraculously absorbing Greenland, Panama and Canada into a Viagra-infused American empire. It’s worth noting that Trump repeatedly promised to end the Ukraine war within days of taking office, and all discourse on the issue has subsequently evaporated, probably because his own advisers and supporters are divided on that one, and no fantasy solution presents itself.

Within Trump’s paranoid, narcissistic and information-resistant perceptual universe, in fact, the Gaza scheme must have seemed perfect: It purported to solve an intractable geopolitical problem, and imagined a literal monument to his greatness rising from the rubble of endless war. Those who stood in the way, at first glance, were insignificant: malleable clients (Netanyahu), powerless victims (the Palestinians), irritating scolds (Europe and the U.N.).

He may or may not have been surprised to learn that many people still pretend to believe in international law — which he and most other Republicans view as a virtue-signaling sham — and that the Arab world seems oddly reluctant to surrender the notional locus of a notional Palestinian state to an imaginary trillion-dollar American real estate venture. Trump is contemptuous of such pieties, as a recent New York Times analysis put it:

Mr. Trump views foreign policy as a real estate deal maker. He has never cared about international law, never lectured autocratic leaders about human rights as other U.S. presidents have done. Instead, for decades, he has viewed the world as a collection of countries that are ripping America off. He is preoccupied by the question of how to gain leverage over other nations, whether they are allies or adversaries. And he searches for ways to use American power to dominate other countries and to extract whatever he can.

In the harsh light of day, we may be forced to admit that amid all Trump's whining, he’s got about half a point: There will be no Palestinian state anytime in the foreseeable future, Israel has established itself as the region’s hegemonic power since the Oct. 7 attack, and the inexorable tides of global capital are likely to determine most policy outcomes. It doesn’t follow, of course, that Trump can will Club Gaza into being through sheer force of personality, literally declare war on the E.U. by invading Greenland, or mesmerize Canadians into surrendering their national autonomy. 

Those ideas may disappear down the Trumpian memory hole along with so many others, but as multiple reports have assured us, he was “deadly serious” about them when he proposed them. Where I land in the Trump acid trip, unfortunately, is to take the experience as it comes, and to view it as exceptionally dangerous. Donald Trump means what he says and says what he means, from one moment to the next; he is a fearful, elderly megalomaniac eager to reshape the world in his own image, however and whenever he can.