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Inside Trump’s Hastily Written Proposal to ‘Own’ Gaza
Although the president had been talking about the idea for weeks, there had been no meetings on the subject, and senior members of his government were taken by surprise.
When President Trump announced his proposal for the United States to take ownership of Gaza on Tuesday, he shocked even senior members of his own White House and government.
While his announcement looked formal and thought-out — he read the plan from a sheet of paper — his administration had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
It wasn’t only the Americans who were scrambling; the announcement came as just as much of a surprise to Mr. Trump’s Israeli visitors. Soon before they walked out for their joint news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump surprised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel by telling him he planned to announce the Gaza ownership idea, according to two people briefed on their interactions.
Inside the U.S. government, there had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal, let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work.
There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head.
Unlike major foreign policy announcements with past presidents, including Mr. Trump, the notion of the United States controlling Gaza had never been part of a public discussion before Tuesday.
But privately, Mr. Trump had been talking about U.S. ownership of the enclave for weeks. And his thinking had accelerated, according to two administration officials, after his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, returned from Gaza last week and described the horrific conditions there.
But nobody — not in the White House, not the Israelis — expected Mr. Trump to roll out the idea on Tuesday until shortly before he did so. The idea was met with immediate opposition from the Arab world, including from Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally. And in comments to reporters on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to soften some of Mr. Trump’s statements.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/us/politics/trump-gaza-takeover.html
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44K in Michigan voted for Stein. 14K of them in Dearborn. They got their victory.
This statement has to be the understatement of the young century, from the founder of "Arabs for Trump."
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:x7pfahf33wtfi6ed5aowhm6k/bafkreicwe3hbuklxsfl2jinxxm5e2k3pd7zggmvz32pykms4m6uezu2w64@jpeg
Crazy economist who likes to write about higher education.
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Inside the U.S. government, there had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal
Narrator: It was never a serious policy proposal.
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Somebody thought it was. Probably still does.
Here's the plan:
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Just got back from the biggest junk shop I have ever seen. Crazy place - stacked to the rafters with all sorts of stuff - mostly trash. Bought a little marble bookend for $5. Pakistan, doncha know.
Colorful proprietor was holding court with a couple of buddies, all geezing away about the crazy stuff Spanky did this week. Consensus was that Gaza was never going to happen and it’s all BS.
All I could do was nod along.
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Little by little, the people who supported Trump will figure out they've been had.
Donald Trump won Dearborn, Michigan, a traditionally Democratic Arab American enclave, thanks largely to outrage over Kamala Harris and the Biden administration’s stance on Israel.
Some are starting to have regrets.
After Trump unveiled a plan to “take over” Gaza and relocate nearly 2 million Palestinians to neighboring countries, two mayors in the region who had stumped for Trump have gone silent. And some Dearborn residents have been left horrified by the president’s attitude toward Palestinians.
After Trump made his comments, people in Dearborn are responding “with extreme anger and disappointment with this president who lied to this community to steal some of their votes,” said Osama Siblani, editor of Dearborn’s Arab American News.
Siblani, who declined to endorse in the presidential race, predicted that the proposal will “fail” and that Trump is “acting like a leader of a gangster group and not the most powerful nation in the world. Disgrace.”
One leader in Dearborn, granted anonymity to speak candidly, described a sense of remorse among some in the Arab American community who voted for Trump or sat out the election but now “think we screwed up but we’re not going to admit it.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/06/trump-arab-americans-dearborn-michigan-00203018
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Personally I think his thoughts of offering to temporarily move the population and rebuild the area are very generous, given what the Palestinian Authority terrorists did and are doing to Americans; and the terrorists openly say they will do it again.
Kill, kidnap, execute.https://www.ajc.org/news/how-many-americans-have-been-killed-by-hamas-before-and-after-october-7
I'd have demanded unconditional surrender of the Gazan terror regime. And have then proceeded to systematically flatten every Gazan building in a methodical search to free all of the international hostages.
From what I gather watching Al-jazz propaganda and the Fench & BBC news channels, the terrorists will keep some hostages (for years) and in a month or so Israel will renew attempts to rescue them and secure the safety of its people.
More of the same. -
You'd have to show the mass graves, the dead woman, children, elderly, the disabled, the body parts thereof, those under ruble, the maimed, the starving, those dead of disease, and those dying of disease. You'd have to show the entire (emphasis added) infrastructure dating back millennia which has been obliterated.
Genocide does not mean there are no survivors in various states of health. This has never been part of the definition.
As for Trump, my words would best not be posted.
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It's not profoundly wrong, not worth noticing, when the Biden administration is doing it, but becomes into focus clearly, and the implications of it are spelled out for all the world to see, when the Trump administration is carrying out the same genocide, with the same methods, and the same
Link to video
goals. -
Gaza didn't look like rubble yesterday on Al jazz when a few hundred armed Hamas uniformed fighters made large of a peaceful and unnecessary ceremony to hand over three gaunt looking civilian hostages, starved for 16 months.
The targetted bombing has obviously been ineffective.Biden rightly called the thousands of Palestinian terrorists "worse than animals".
Trump has, since taking office, made them a quite startling offer.Of course it's probably a non starter and his way of leading into a bargaining discussion.
Nevertheless there is another possible future state to consider, a threat for Iran, gristle for those Palestinian animals to chew on as they fester in their own hatred.
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Well they could rebuild a third at a time, so only a third would be moved out at a time.
Something needs to be done; Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia are no more helpful than Yemen, Iran, Qatar and UAE.
The massacres and kidnapping of 7th October 2023 cannot be allowed to be repeated. And if Gaza has to be bulldozed then amen.
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It's pretty much "somewhere other than Gaza". And he's threatening to withhold aid from Jordan and Egypt if they don't take any Palestinians.
And he keeps saying it won't cost Americans anything. That there will be no military involvement. Just sprinkle some fairy dust around and he can develop this dandy new real estate parcel...
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The world has figured him out. Give him something and he can claim the win.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II said Tuesday that he would take in 2,000 Palestinian children from Gaza who are very sick or have cancer in response to a plan by President Donald Trump to resettle the residents of the war-torn strip.
Trump called the offer a “beautiful gesture” and said he believed “99%” that something could be worked out with Egypt, another regional partner that had bristled at the president's surprise plan. "We'll have some others helping," Trump added.
