At a news conference Tuesday alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump mused about the United States’ taking over Gaza, leveling it and creating “an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.”
The Jerusalem Post argued that it’s not a “realistic strategy” but merely “an opening bid in a negotiation.” But the real effect of the shocking proposal — which came after Trump called for relocating Gaza’s roughly 2 million human beings to other Arab countries — is moving the Overton Window (the range of ideas generally considered acceptable) to places that were previously unthinkable.
An early summation of Trump’s governing style in his second administration could be: ‘The psychopathy is the point.’
It’s one of the most effective tactics in Trumpism. He and his allies lie with impunity, spew rank bigotry or propose patently illegal “solutions,” then accuse critics of lying about what was said or hysterically overreacting to it. Before you know it, notions that would have previously disqualified someone from office — or from being treated as a serious political commentator — are whitewashed as “outside the box” thinking by an “antiestablishment” iconoclast.
“Take Trump seriously but not literally” is the most comfortable refuge for Trump’s useful apologists. This was always a cowardly position. Now, after Trump has already been in power and attempted to stay in office after losing the 2020 election, it is willfully delusional.
Trump may or may not have been “serious” with his comments about a U.S.-led “takeover” of Gaza (his national security adviser indicated he is serious, while his press secretary insisted no “commitment” has yet been made). It may be all a part of his “madman” style of foreign policy. But that doesn’t matter. We’re now talking about the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Gaza as though it’s a legitimate proposal or a shrewd negotiating tactic — and not something that completely flies in the face of the United States’ supposed commitment to supporting human rights and international law.
During Trump’s first administration, Adam Serwer wrote a seminal essay in The Atlantic titled “The Cruelty Is the Point.” An early summation of Trump’s governing style in his second administration, not even three weeks old, could be: “The psychopathy is the point.”
In an Atlantic essay titled “The Startling Accuracy of Referring to Politicians as ‘Psychopaths,’” published during the 2012 election, author James Silver wrote: “Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, which include lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.”
There have been plenty of recriminations about the collapse of the left-wing and ex-Republican “Resistance” that characterized so much of the opposition to Trump before November, as well as perceptions of feckless dithering and a lack of direction from Democratic leadership. That’s all fair! But when the president cavalierly suggests the United States will participate in a military intervention whose goals include the displacement of an ethnic group — that’s the time for the resistance to come from Trump’s allies and fellow travelers on the right, if they have any spine at all.
Right now would be a great time for U.S. pro-Israel hawks to say, “We support Israel’s war against Hamas, even with the devastating civilian collateral damage, but all we want is for Israelis to live in peaceful coexistence with their neighbors, and we would never even humor calls for ethnic cleansing.” Instead, you’ve got the ultrapartisan conservative commentator Ben Shapiro praising Trump’s “absolutely transformative” vision for Gaza, adding that “there is no doubt that Trump’s creative thinking is breaking the mold and changing things.”
He has not only moved the Overton Window; he has opened it wide for humanity’s worst instincts to become just another political issue.
Some MAGA-libertarians who’ve inexplicably praised Trump’s “anti-interventionism” — despite his massively expanding the drone war in his first term and more recently threatening to “take back” the Panama Canal and refusing to rule out military force to take over Greenland — shrugged that an American occupation of Gaza is unlikely to happen and argued anyone who takes Trump seriously on this matter is blowing things out of proportion. To their credit, Trump ally Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., forcefully rejected the idea as against the principles of “America First,” while Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called it “problematic.” However, Graham’s fellow South Carolinian Republican Rep. Nancy Mace posted to X, “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-A-Lago.”
It’s also risible to make excuses for Trump as merely doing his Trump thing of throwing outrageous ideas at the wall to trigger the media and the libs, given the fact that his son-in-law Jared Kushner, as a senior adviser during his first administration, proposed a “peace plan” that allowed for a partial Israeli annexation of the West Bank and more recently gushed over the prospect of developing Gaza’s “very valuable” “waterfront property.”
Whether Trump “means it” when he says he’s prepared to order atrocities that would permanently stain the moral character of both the United States and Israel isn’t material. That he says it at all — and that it’s treated by his supporters as either a harmless joke or a brilliant opening negotiation position — changes the calculus of how we discuss the forever conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It also eliminates boundaries of decency that had been generally agreed upon by most on the political spectrum. That’s a huge part of Trump’s legacy.
If ethnic cleansing is on the table at all, Trump has already done his job. He has not only moved the Overton Window; he has opened it wide for humanity’s worst instincts to become just another political issue, as worthy of consideration and debate as any other.
