Two longtime CNN hosts appeared stunned Tuesday by President Donald Trump’s Oval Office remarks just moments earlier where he sat beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and delivered a casual assessment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“You can’t live in Gaza right now,” Trump said. “You look over the decades, it’s all death in Gaza, this has been happening for years, it’s all death.” He added: “I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza. I think that Gaza has been very unlucky for them. Why would they want to return? It’s been hell.”
CNN anchor Jake Tapper called Trump’s remarks during the question and answer session with reporters “very shocking to a lot of individuals.” He told fellow host John King that Trump made “interesting comments” but added: “I’m saying interesting because I’m really not even sure how to respond to it.”
That’s when King jumped in to offer a history lesson to Trump while shredding the idea of forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza and having them resettle elsewhere.
“If you don't think elections have consequences, listen to that over and over and over again,” King said. “And President Trump says it so casually sometimes you don't understand what he's saying because he just says it as if he's saying, you know, 'Tuesday comes after Monday and there's a weekend before that.'”
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King went on to highlight the unprecedented nature of the President of the United States “sitting in the Oval Office endorsing the forcible resettlement of Palestinians off their own land, off of land that international law recognizes as their land, as land that the United States – until two weeks and a day ago at least – recognized as their land.”
King continued by launching into a brief background of the region’s historic conflicts over the decades and then offered his own political analysis of Trump stepping into the situation, which has unfolded over more than 60 years as Palestinians have struggled for their own independent state.
“For the President of the United States – the United States, a democracy — to say we would forcibly support the forcible resettlement of people because he says it's 'hell,' the Palestinian people would tell you that's their land, and they didn't want to be, you know, there was a terrorist attack on Israel on October 7…but the idea that a result of that should be the Palestinian people forcibly resettled off their land with no international conversation, no Palestinian representation by the president of United States. I can’t think of a bigger policy shift like that.”
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