As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been avoiding paying attention recently to the chaos descending on the country I love as its system of government is being dismantled. I don’t see anything I can do about it at the moment, so why waste my time writing about it? And if I’m not writing, why dwell on it?
I used to believe I could help. I used to believe in ideas, and facts, and rational discussion. But then over the last few months I realized that almost nobody was interested in that, and that facts had no force in a country that was dazzled by the promise of magic beans and that actually, truly believed that they were entitled to their own facts. Maybe Daniel Patrick Moynihan could argue them out of that, but he’s not around anymore. So I’ve been biding my time, hoping that the fog of foolishness would dissipate enough that we could see each other again, and have a nice, long talk.
But news seeps in, when you subscribe to four or five newspapers and a couple of serious magazines (I haven’t dropped that habit, alas). And other people around me have been paying attention on purpose, and babbling about it within my hearing. And I try to be patient, but often fail, especially when people say something like, “Did you hear he did THIS? I can’t believe it! I never expected THAT…!”
To which I sometimes explode with some variation on, “You didn’t? What DID you expect? Have you not been paying attention at ALL for the past eight years? Did you really not notice? Did you really not believe anything he said (to the extent it was intelligible to an English speaker)? Did you not realize the first term was mild, compared with what he WANTED to do, because the grownups kept stopping him? What did you THINK it would be like this time, with no grownups?”
And so forth… but then I’d distract myself with something — a novel, or a history book, a long walk, or something bingeable on the Boob Tube — and calm down a bit.
But this time he got my attention:
President Trump declared on Tuesday that the United States should seize control of Gaza and permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave, one of the most brazen ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.
Hosting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House, Mr. Trump said that all two million Palestinians from Gaza should be moved to countries like Egypt and Jordan because of the devastation wrought by Israel’s campaign against Hamas after the terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference Tuesday evening. “We’ll own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism. Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Mr. Trump vowed to turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”…
Notice that nice, conservative language the folks at The New York Times used in that first graf. I refer to the phrase, “one of the most brazen ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.” I don’t know who chose those words for the lede — there are three names in the byline — but that writer and his or her editor was just too flummoxed, too blown away and rattled, to be any more precise than that.
So we get “one of the most” instead of “the most,” and “in years” rather than a particular date. This thing is so utterly wild that it’s impossible to place it clearly into the context of history.
As a longtime opinion writer, I have a bit more leeway to describe it. But I tend to want to stick with what I always say about this guy: We have never, ever before had anyone this crazy, unqualified and clueless in the White House, so we’ve never heard anything this wild. Oh, there were points when Nixon and George W. tried the strategy of convincing enemies and potential enemies that they were crazy to do anything, so you’d better not mess with the U.S. of A. But those gambits didn’t work out in the long run, and subsequent leaders went out of their way to convince frieds and adversaries they would never pull stuff like that. (The Obama national security team even had their own private guiding slogan for that.)
Basically, there is no precedent for this. But we can look back to things that have some degree of similarity. The first place I would point to would be the Indian Removal Act. Andy Jackson is a hero to the current fellow, to the extent he knows anything about him. You can say a lot of things for Jackson, and even more against, and I generally focus on the latter. He did get us through the Nullification Crisis, so good one there, but his most visible lasting effect on the nation was moving the Indians west of the Mississippi.
I mean, the Battle of New Orleans was still much celebrated when I lived there as a kid, but didn’t have the same lasting effect — and not just because it happened after the war was over.
But the removal of the descendants of the original human inhabitants of this hemisphere had an effect that we can look around us and see. Sure, I know we still technically have Indians in South Carolina — a fact reasserted and affirmed by our governor just yesterday — I basically grew up on this side of the Big Muddy without seeing people with noticeably Native American features. I fully realized this when I lived in Kansas in the mid-80s, in a city that was originally a major gathering place for pow-wows between tribes. I regularly saw people who looked something like this guy, and the impact of Jackson’s actions came home to me.
Well, this is kinda like that. An entire population forced to move out of their homes to an unknown destination. But that’s about it. That, after all, happened domestically. Here, we’re going to the oldest part of the Old World to empty a country — or a sort of country, when you consider the Strip’s unusual history — of its entire population. True, a lot of these folks consider their actual homes to be next door in Israel — some are quite insistent on that point (consider that to be my entry in the 2025 Understatement of the Year competition), but I suspect they’d pretty much rather be where they are than wherever Trump wants to put them.
This proposal has certainly made one guy happy — Benjamin Netanyahu. But he’s hardly alone; a lot of Israelis are with him. And one can understand why (unless one is among those college students who thought staging demonstrations to damage the Biden administration was a good move for improving the plight of Palestinians; but those folks are pretty thick). Assuming such a wild and improbably thing could be pulled off, nothing like the attacks of October 7, 2023 would ever happen again. And Israel would never again be forced to defend itself against an enemy that deliberately hides among a civilian population, thereby ensuring that the whole world would condemn Israel, and make anti-Semitism respectable again.
That’s how crazy this is — it has its tempting aspects.
Of course, aside from the various objections that will arise from folks who actually understand such things as international relations, diplomacy, war, and ethics, there’s the problem that such a thing happening is practically impossible.
Of course, our president doesn’t care about that. He cares about how it plays. If it boosts his popularity, why not?
And when he said it, the guy next to him was smiling, so… success!
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I commented there briefly on the NYT’s word choice in that lede, but didn’t say a word about Trump’s. I did that because a newspaper’s choice of words is deliberate and the result of actual thought, and therefore means something.
Also, I was trying to brief.
But I will offer one quick comment on the phrase, “…and we will do a job with it too.”
I know our new jefe is no reader, but maybe somebody mentioned to him this phrase that crops up repeatedly in The Godfather (I mean the book; I don’t recall whether it comes up in the movie.): “Do the job.”
Immediately after committing the act that converts him from an innocent civilian to a mobster, Michael finds himself reflecting on that phrase:
An irrelevant thing for him to dwell on at such a moment. But our current president inspires us to wonder about such things, too.