President Donald Trump's plan to deport all the Palestinians in Gaza to other countries and redevelop the area as the "Riviera of the Middle East" with the possible help of the U.S. military is completely "insane," former GOP strategist turned Lincoln Project adviser Rick Wilson wrote for his Substack on Wednesday.
Already, Trump's comments, made at a news conference Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have drawn international outrage — and for good reason, wrote Wilson.
"Donald Trump just openly committed American arms, honor, and credibility to forcibly expel Gaza’s Palestinian population and redevelop the territory into a glittering tourist hub," wrote Wilson. "Yes, it sounds entirely unhinged, and it may torpedo any remaining hope of an enduring Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. It also hands every Islamist militant group an airtight propaganda victory: proof, in their eyes, that the United States is indeed the 'Great Satan.' It’s sounds insane because it is. It sounds manic because it is. It sounds deranged because it is."
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Yet the press is approaching this idea the wrong way, Wilson continued — their reaction "stems from the persistent, and persistently wrong, assumption that Trump acts with coherent intent, good counsel, sound judgment, and the nation’s interests at heart. In reality, he is a figure of chaos, a 'last-person-heard' president who leaps from one manic idea to the next." After all, he ran for office on the premise of non-intervention and resolving global military conflicts peacefully, not more American adventurism.
One of the most telling reactions to Trump's Gaza proposal, said Wilson, came from his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, a longtime GOP strategist with a reputation for whipping those around her into ruthless discipline; she looked on at Trump, her eyes bulging and her expression astonished.
"The widely photographed look on Susie Wiles’s face spoke volumes: even insiders realize nothing and no one controls Trump. He is a man who is, by all appearances, is both mentally unstable and cognitively unable to process reality beyond his own mental architecture," wrote Wilson. "The damage is mounting, and even red-state leaders are slowly waking up to the danger of entrusting government after government function to the most extreme and least capable loyalists."
