The Trump Factor in the Middle East

Alternately belligerent, self-enriching, militaristic, and realist, Trump’s haphazard path is different from the establishment’s slow road to obliterating Gaza.

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Before President Trump even took office in January, his personal envoy delivered an unlikely win. Since last spring, President Biden’s diplomats had been unable to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a cease-fire. But Trump’s man, real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff, joined the Biden team’s effort weeks before the inauguration. Witkoff put immense pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly saying that his relationship with the incoming American president depended on him accepting the deal. After a 96-hour marathon of talks in Qatar, Witkoff clinched a cease-fire and hostage exchange.

In so doing, Trump appeared to make good on his robust outreach to Arab and Muslim voters, who had helped him carry swing states. The campaign promised that Trump would prioritize two things: “an end to the wars, and a lasting peace in the Middle East that is satisfactory to all parties,” Bishara Bahbah, chair of Arab Americans for Trump, told me. And he had already checked off item one.

But weeks into his second term, Trump suggested that the U.S. would forcibly displace Palestinians in Gaza, that the United States would occupy the territory as part of a “Gaza Riviera” plan, full of threats and ethnic cleansing. He doubled down on the idea in an outlandish AI-generated social media post, with him lying on the beach shirtless beside Netanyahu, and a song playing “no more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here.”

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Read more of Jonathan’s article in The American Prospect

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