How does ‘America should own Gaza, and we’ll use the military to get it if we have to!’ jibe with Trump’s cherished ‘America first!’ promises?
When I saw President Donald Trump standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying the United States should own Gaza and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” my first thought was: Well, the old wretch’s cheese has finally slid off his saltine.
But then, as I digested Tuesday night’s despicable, inhumane comments – which amounted to a U.S. president proposing some mild ethnic cleansing to create seaside resorts – I wondered if perhaps it’s all just chaos theater, an attempt to distract us from his administration’s swift destruction of our government.
Neither option is good, of course.
We either have a mad-as-a-hatter president who is seriously saying he wants to clear 2 million human beings from Palestinian land and give them “a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land,” adding: “It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return.”
Or we have a president who would hurl a rhetorical grenade like that into the already volatile Middle East – proposing something that would likely violate the Geneva Conventions – as a cynical ploy to keep Americans from noticing the wackadoodle billionaire Trump has enlisted to gut the federal workforce.
How does “America should own Gaza, and we’ll use the military to get it if we have to!” jibe with Trump’s cherished “America first!” promises?
Why did Trump campaign on lowering food prices and inflation only to get into office and have tech-billionaire Elon Musk almost instantly dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose staffers around the globe were told Tuesday they’re about to be put on leave?
I don’t recall a campaign rally where Trump said, “I will ignore the Constitution and recklessly dissolve an entire government agency without congressional approval, and I’ll do it in a way that will cost the government tens of million of dollars!”
Yeah, I definitely would have remembered that.
As The Associated Press reported: The United States “spends less than 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, a smaller share of its budget than some countries. Health programs like those credited with helping end polio and smallpox epidemics and an acclaimed HIV/AIDS program that saved more than 20 million lives in Africa already have stopped. So have monitoring and deployments of rapid-response teams for contagious diseases such as an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.
