Trump’s Grand Theft Gaza

February 5, 2025Donald Trump, that grandiloquent philosopher-king of the gaudy and grotesque, has once again graced the world stage with a proposal so magnificent in its crudeness, so imperial in its insipidity, that one wonders if he has finally transcended the realm of the absurd into some new, undiscovered territory of human folly.With all the subtlety of a carnival barker auctioning off swampland in Florida, the man who once wished to buy Greenland has now set his imperial sights on Gaza—war-torn, blood-soaked, and to his singularly refined sensibilities, a prime bit of beachfront real estate. And why not? What is a smoldering ruin if not an opportunity for a casino? Why should the graves of the slain not be adorned with neon lights? If the pyramids of Egypt can be illuminated for tourists, why not the shattered homes of Palestinians, rebranded as “The Trump Riviera,” complete with an 18-hole golf course and a live-action recreation of the Six-Day War for the amusement of visiting cruise ships?“Everybody loves it,” he proclaims, a statement which, in the dictionary of Trumpian English, means precisely the opposite. Indeed, one could trawl the seven seas and find not a single sane statesman, diplomat, or war-weary refugee who does not regard this proposal as a blend of medieval conquest and third-rate real estate speculation. The international community has recoiled in horror; China, Germany, Saudi Arabia—all unified, for once, in their unanimous rejection of this fever dream. Even the despotic and duplicitous, the power-hungry and the perfidious, have paused in their customary villainy to gawk, dumbfounded, at this latest eruption from the inexhaustible volcano of Trump’s ego.Yet the ever-loyal Karoline Leavitt, in her role as minister of sycophancy, calls it “historic” and “outside-the-box thinking.” And indeed it is—just as it would be “outside-the-box” to suggest turning the Grand Canyon into a waste dump or repurposing the Lincoln Memorial as a roller disco. The sheer gall of the thing, the monstrous lack of awareness, the magnificent disdain for history, law, and basic human decency—these are the trademarks of a Trumpian initiative.His son-in-law, that hushed whisper of a man, Jared Kushner, has previously described Gaza as “valuable” real estate, a remark which suggests that he perceives human suffering much as a vulture perceives carrion—not as tragedy, but as a chance to fatten. To them, Gaza is not a scarred land inhabited by millions with nowhere else to go; it is a “fixer-upper,” a neglected beachfront property that, if stripped of its pesky inhabitants and polished up a bit, might fetch a fine price.But of course, this plan requires that the people of Gaza be, in Trump’s delicate phrasing, “relocated.” The term is chosen with all the care of a butcher naming a new cut of meat—neutral, antiseptic, and devoid of any hint that what is meant is exile, dispossession, the wholesale uprooting of a people whose suffering is already so great that even the most hardened cynic might pause before making it worse. But Trump, as ever, is immune to such sentimental considerations. To him, the inconvenience of an entire population clinging to their land is no different than the inconvenience of a tenant refusing to vacate a condo earmarked for demolition.In Gaza, the response has been, to put it mildly, unenthusiastic. “Trump can go to hell,” declares one man who has seen his home reduced to rubble. It is a sentiment that might, with equal justice, be applied by the Greenlanders, the Panamanians, and the Canadians—all of whom, in the brief weeks since Trump’s return to office, have been subjected to his deranged fantasies of territorial acquisition.And what of America, the land that has once again inflicted this man upon the world? Is there no voice of reason among its ranks? No whisper of dissent within its gilded halls? The question is met with silence, save for the hum of air conditioning in Washington boardrooms where men in dark suits assure each other that this, like all Trumpian lunacies, will pass. But one wonders how many such lunacies the world can endure before some permanent harm is done—before another catastrophe is etched into the annals of history under the heading Yet Another Trump Disaster.For now, the world watches, aghast, as the great hotelier-turned-autocrat surveys the wreckage of a besieged city and sees, not sorrow, not horror, not the tragedy of an unending war—but a business opportunity. It is conquest by commercialism, imperialism by investment portfolio, a travesty dressed in the language of tourism. If ever there were a vision of hell on earth, it is this: a warlord draped in a golf towel, extolling the virtues of a beachfront property where the tide washes away not just the blood, but the very memory of those who lived there.And so, as the sun sets over the smoldering ruins of Gaza, let us pause to appreciate the spectacle of the age: the grotesque farce of a man who, having bankrupted casinos, universities, airlines, and steaks, now proposes to do the same to history itself. The world may reject him. Reality may rebuke him. But the Trumpian carnival rolls on, ever louder, ever more ridiculous, until at last the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.Music and Text Copyright © 2025 by Paul Henry Smith Get full access to The Generative Gazette at generativegazette.substack.com/subscribe