General Discussion

https://fpif.org/trumps-greatest-con-is-genocide/

June 5, 2025


Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu (Shutterstock)

Among all the cons that Donald Trump has pushed on the world, none has compared to his plan for facilitating genocide in Gaza. While his administration has continued providing Israel with the weapons that it is using to destroy Gaza, the U.S. president has been making a business pitch in favor of genocide. By proposing to depopulate Gaza and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” Trump has been trying to persuade the world’s wealthiest people that they can gain from the destruction of the territory. Although the media has shifted its focus away from Trump’s proposal, he continues to promote it. “Think about it,” Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said in a speech from the Senate floor on May 8. “2.2 million desperate people who have been bombed and starved and driven from their homes are now about to be forcibly expelled from their territory into God knows where so that Trump and his friends can build a Riviera for the billionaire class.”

U.S. Appeals to Genocide

In the United States, there is a long history of U.S. leaders making arguments in favor of genocide. Although the term genocide was not coined until World War II as part of an effort to condemn the Nazis for the Holocaust and hold them legally accountable for their crimes against humanity, previous generations of U.S. officials had developed arguments for eliminating entire groups of people. For centuries, some of the most influential U.S. politicians envisioned the eradication of Native Americans. Benjamin Franklin thought that it could be “the design of Providence to extirpate these savages,” as he called indigenous people. Their elimination would “make room for the cultivators of the earth,” meaning Anglo-American settlers.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the United States would commit genocide against Native Americans. In a reference to what he called “backward” groups of Native Americans, Jefferson wrote that “we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest, into the stony mountains.” Attacks by Native Americans against U.S. settlers “will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.” Often, U.S. officials have appealed to notions of manifest destiny, or the idea that God has chosen U.S. settlers to inhabit all of America. In 1845, the prominent political writer John O’Sullivan popularized the notion when he wrote about “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.”

Trump has made appeals to manifest destiny, including one in his second inaugural address, but his arguments in favor of genocide in Gaza have been different. Rather than claiming that he is trying to create living space for settlers from Israel or the United States, he has made a business pitch to the world’s elite, casting them as the primary beneficiaries of genocide in Gaza. When Trump first called for the United States to “take over the Gaza Strip,” he presented a vision in which Gaza would be completely emptied of Palestinians to become one of the most luxurious resort areas in the world. “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal,” the president said. Gaza can become “the Riviera of the Middle East.” On social media, the president boasted that his plan would result in “one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.”

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