The Presidency is not performance art

And it's dangerous to encourage Donald Trump to act like it is

This isn’t why I voted for him.

And if you are being honest with yourself, it’s not why you voted for him either.¹

Last night, President Donald Trump said the United States should take over the Gaza Strip and force out the two million Palestinians who live there. With its Mediterranean beachfront, Gaza could become a new “Riviera,” he said.

Okay, let’s be clear, since this is not the moment to mince words. This idea is insane.

It is just short of genocide. It violates international treaties and laws against forced deportation. These aren’t dumb, useless climate change pacts, but crucial laws that keep countries from wars meant to take land by displacing existing populations.

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(Sometimes the truth hurts. I’ll tell you anyway.)

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As a practical matter, taking Gaza would be catastrophic, enmeshing the United States military in a colonial occupation without precedent in American history. Unlike our quasi-occupations of Iraq and Vietnam, we wouldn’t have a local government to work beside or to give us political cover.

And how exactly would these deportations work? Would we be rounding up unwilling Palestinian men, women, and children and putting them on trucks? Those images would lead to a wave of Islamic terror that would dwarf Sept. 11.

Trump’s proposal also runs entirely contrary to his view of the Middle East and American military power more generally for THE LAST 20 YEARS — which is that America shouldn’t be fighting wars or undertaking the grand geopolitical initiatives known as “nation-building.”

In fact, as much as any moment, Trump’s critique of George W. Bush’s Iraq war, his willingness to call it a “big, fat mistake,” pushed him to the top of Republican primaries in 2016.

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(That was then…)

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So what’s really happening here?

There are a few possibilities.

1: Trump is serious. He is tired of hearing about Gaza and wants to make it the world’s problem, and he believes that Israel will be safer if it doesn’t have to deal with Palestinians in Gaza (and possibly the West Bank too).

2: Trump is semi-serious. He wants to light a fire under the Arab world to do something about Gaza, and he thinks this proposal will do so. He views this idea as a negotiating tactic.

3: Trump did it to distract the world from the fact that he’s going to let Israel do whatever it wants in Gaza. By the way, I am fine with letting Israel do what it wants in Gaza. (I know many of you disagree, but I think Israelis have the right to live without fear of mass terror attacks.) But that’s Israel’s problem, not ours.

4: Trump likes attention, and he hadn’t gotten enough Tuesday.

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I don’t know which of these four possibilities is right. I’m not sure anyone does, maybe including Trump himself. But it doesn’t matter. They’re all terrible. The head of the most powerful country in the world, a nation with a nuclear arsenal big enough to kill billions of people, cannot be in it for the luluz, as the shitposters on 8-chan say. Repeatedly threatening territorial expansion makes the world unstable and dangerous. The leaders of major countries - nuclear-armed countries - cannot and do not act this way.

And Democrats can’t be the only ones calling this idiocy out.

Trump has a rollicking two weeks, he’s issued lots of executive orders, some legal and others maybe not. But Republicans, in Congress and out, need to stand up to him before he goes too far.

It’s all fun 'n games until China invades Taiwan.

1. If you did. But it seems fair to assume most American readers of Unreported Truths did.