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GELFAND’S WORLD - To dust off an old joke: In the early days of World War II, the entire population of Liechtenstein was evacuated IN A BLIMP! (We'll get to the punchline and to the joke's relevance down below.)
We're now into the third week of the second presidency of Donald Trump, and in that time there have been a couple dozen shocks and surprises. There are three or four lessons to be learned.
1) You don't have to take any proposal seriously at the start. On Tuesday, Trump proposed removing the entire population of Gaza and turning the property into a beach resort. (I wonder what blimp he is planning to use.) On Wednesday, the presidential press secretary explained that the entire world had misunderstood, and that the Gazans would be welcomed back after the United States had rebuilt the country.
The whole thing is a bit bizarre. If you are going to stand up in front of the press and television cameras in order to explain the evacuation of a population of 2 million war-weary people, it would ordinarily be expected that you would think to explain something about their ultimate residence. And in fact, we had already heard from Trump, that those people are to be resettled in Egypt and other Arab countries. The proposal to deport everyone and to develop Gaza as a real estate project was made pretty clear on Tuesday. Everyone understood that it meant the permanent exile of the Gazans. The Arabs use the word Nakba to describe this process. Any such attempt would place a large number of Arabs in a permanent state of war with the United States.
On Wednesday, the White House press secretary tried to claim that it was all a big misunderstanding, and that the Gazans would be returned to Gaza after the place had been cleaned up and restored. It was entirely unbelievable that this had been Trump's original intent. It was clearly the result of the international response to the Trump proposal.
The main data point coming from Wednesday's walk-back is that we don't have to take anything Trump says seriously when he first offers a threat or proposal about foreign policy. Whether it's Canadian tariffs or the second Nakba, Trump simply lacks the gravitas and leadership ability to put together a serious, constructive idea and stay with it.
We might contrast the Trump approach to the way that Richard Nixon eased relations with Red China. Nixon sent Henry Kissinger on a series of meetings and only when the deal had been carefully vetted was the plan made public. Of course the Nixon-Kissinger plan was to create a deal that would actually work and to follow it through to the end point.
2) Nothing Trump says is true. Oh, there are the odd comments that are accidentally correct, but the man's ability to lie with a straight face is legendary, and he seems to be enjoying its usage at the moment.
One corollary of lessons 1 and 2 is that you can never believe what the press secretary says. This conclusion is simply a repetition of what we observed in Trump's first term, but is worth noting.
3) There is one more conclusion that we can make based on all of the above: Trump doesn't seem to have the ability to think things through. We noticed this during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when Trump would hold a press conference and, in the presence of medical professionals, talk about quack remedies as if they were useful. (For those who don't follow such things, there is a small group of people who believe in treating diseases by swallowing a bleach derivative. It is of course nonsense, but there are always people who believe in cult-lore.)
We used to refer to this habit as "shooting from the hip." The problem for this country is that Trump doesn't seem to use this technique to push credible ideas or acceptable foreign policies. He mostly gets things wrong.
4) Here's the worst lesson: The more you listen to Trump's foreign policy pronouncements, the more you begin to conclude that he has delusions of grandeur. We had a little hint of that with his claim to be a "stable genius" the last time around. Looking and listening, it becomes more and more clear that he really thinks of himself like this. The rest of us recognize him as a guy who can't change a hubcap, but he really seems to think that he alone can fix America and save the world. And he does this by impulsively coming up with stupid ideas and -- without vetting them through even his inadequate cabinet -- just goes out and announces them to the world.
We've all run into somebody like that somewhere. There was this guy who stood at the corner of Fairfax and Melrose, explaining that he had disproved Einstein's theory of relativity. Others of this ilk merely curl up on the sidewalk and groan. A few of these stable geniuses lead their cults into mass suicide. We know the type, but we don't usually vote for them.
In fact, it would appear that a small but growing faction of voters are showing buyers' remorse. Here is one summary from the Washington Monthly. Daily Kos brings up a similar problem for Trump, which you can read here. It seems that the voters wanted cheaper eggs and an increase in border enforcement, but not the all-out craziness.
So let's go back to that Liechtenstein joke. Here it is, in all its glory:
In the days of World War II, the entire population of Liechtenstein was evacuated in a blimp. Hence the expression 'One Nation In Dirigible.'
OK, you can hiss or throw a rubber chicken in response to that joke, but there is a point here. It would be impossible to get the entire population of any country into a blimp . . . unless it's a country with a population of maybe 20 people, or if you were willing to do a couple of thousand such blimp rides.
But the point here is that moving the unwilling people of Gaza into unwilling host countries by force is about like moving a whole country in a dirigible. Given enough time, soldiers, money, and the willingness to commit mass murder, it could be done, but we at least ought to admit that it is a Nazi plan at its heart.
There is a particularly serious aspect to this latest gaffe that needs to be considered. There are Americans who will forgive Trump's Gaza proposal as "Oh well, Donald will be Donald." It is hard to imagine that even loyal MAGA Republicans are interested in getting ourselves into another Middle Eastern war this soon. And everyone with half a brain will realize that it would be a massive fight to deport the 2 million Gazans.
But in Europe, there is another sort of history, and Trump's statements about taking Greenland, Panama, and Gaza -- by force if necessary -- is a reminder of the old German policy called Lebensraum. For almost half a century, the German policy was to make room for ethnic Germans by emptying surrounding countries of their populations. Nowadays we use the term "ethnic cleansing," but the Nazi policy was direct and brutal and didn't rely on any such euphemism. Here's a brief excerpt from Wikipedia on the idea:
"It stipulated that Germany required a Lebensraum necessary for its survival and that most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe would have to be removed permanently (either through mass deportation to Siberia, extermination, or enslavement), including Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, and other Slavic nations considered non-Aryan."
There is one other conclusion that can be drawn from the Gaza proposal. Trump is capable of thinking about Gaza from the standpoint of real estate development. But the people he is talking about are totally expendible in his way of thinking.
The more critical folks among us will look at the Gaza proposal and think, "Trump is just stupid. He has made a laughingstock of himself on this issue the same way he made himself into a laughingstock over the Canadian tariffs." I'm going to agree that the guy doesn't come across as particularly bright when he keeps saying such outlandish things and then allows himself to be forced to reconsider and recant the very next day. But there was a time when he could at least hold his own with actors and investors. Yes, he was always crooked, but he at least had some little core of rationality. But the current Donald Trump doesn't seem to have even that level of cognitive ability. We are seeing a process of dementia working its way through the presidential brain. Perhaps I'm pushing this a bit, but if so, let's see Trump offer a serious, constructive policy proposal and be able to defend it.
Trump's patent racism is clear to Europeans, and his saber rattling over sovereign countries and Gaza alike are becoming more and more obvious. Put it together and the United States becomes something more than the object of amusement that existed under the first Trump term, and becomes something more sinister in its 1930-ish imperialism. The fact that a substantial majority of Americans oppose the Trump policies may be lost on many Europeans.
Addendum
Here's the part you won't hear from the Trump administration as they blame us for the wild fires. Read it here. I'm still waiting to hear the term "climate change" on the Fox Weather channel, which otherwise does competent work.
How about the other networks introducing announcements with the phrase, "What Fox won't tell you, but we will."
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
