What Was That?

Among those who have known and worked with him, Donald Trump is said to be an almost compulsive raconteur. His penchant for off-the-cuff pronouncements and, at times, off-color stories, which have earned him the opprobrium of the stream media and the pillars of the Washington establishment, has at the same time endeared him to tens and tens of millions of Americans. Only the rarest of political talents could have staged the comeback he engineered in 2024—he is, if nothing else, a brilliant marketer. 

The mistake journalists, experts and many millions of Americans (this author very much included) often make when evaluating one or another of Mr. Trump’s pronouncements is to take policy and precedent as a starting point and work backwards from there. More often than not however, the way to successfully untie the Gordian knots that Mr. Trump presents to us, almost as a matter of course, is to start on his home turf: marketing.

Let’s briefly consider some of what Trump let fly at last night’s press conference with the MIT-educated Israeli warlord Benjamin Netanyahu. 

…The U.S. will take over the Gaza strip, and we’ll do a job with it too. We’ll own it. And be responsible for dismantling all the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site … create an economic development that will supply unlimited jobs and housing for people of the area … I do see a long-term ownership position…We‘re gonna take over that piece and we’re gonna develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs.”

I will leave it to far more seasoned foreign policy hands to explain why such a policy, if implemented, would result in disaster for the country and the Trump presidency. It is almost impossible to believe that Mr. Trump’s closest and most senior advisers like Chief of Staff Susan Wiles or the president’s rather effective and impressive Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff signed off on it.

The question I think that needs to be first sorted out is why did he say this?

The marketer in Trump had two overarching goals last evening—sadly neither had anything to do with the justice of the Palestinian cause. The first must have had to do with his campaign to win a Nobel peace prize—something that was handed to his predecessor, Mr. Obama, for no reason whatsoever. “I deserve it,” he said in an Oval Office meeting with Netanyahu yesterday, “but no one will give it to me.” This is not the first time Trump has broached the topic of the seemingly out-of-reach Nobel. In 2018, asked if he deserved the prize for his work on easing tensions with North Korea, the master of the paralipsis mused, “Everyone thinks so, but I would never say it.” Trump seems to think that if he can silence Israel’s guns, even at the risk and cost of colonizing the Gaza Strip, he’ll become the toast of Stockholm.

Marketing is more often than not about money. And here we get to motive number two. Exactly one year ago, during a talk at Harvard University, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who believes he can transform Albania into the next Riviera, said,

…Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on kind of building up livelihoods, you think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation what could have been done—it’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up, but I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.”

Kushner’s talent for understatement (“it’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there”) is either appalling or enviable. That aside, we see very clearly where Mr. Trump might have gotten his inspiration, if not his talking points, for last evening’s alarming performance.

May sanity, somehow, prevail.