AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
Reactions to Donald Trump’s plan to turn the devastated rubble of Gaza into a Riviera playground has been met with a gamut of reactions from bewilderment to outraged condemnation. But I don’t see why anyone should be surprised. Trump is a property developer to his core, being President of the USA doesn’t mean that he has changed his spots.
Turn back the clock to the late ‘70s when Fifth Avenue’s elegant flagship store Bonwit Teller fell on hard times. Trump saw the opportunity: “I love that site, let’s tear the building down!” Trump Towers later rose in its place despite the protests of preservationists and negative press.
In Trump’s book, literally as well as figuratively, there is no such thing as bad publicity, in The Art Of The Deal, he says: “The key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies … a little hyperbole never hurts….it’s an innocent form of exaggeration.”
Not such an innocent fantasy, when Trump’s Gaza plan involves ethnically cleansing more than two million traumatised people from part of their own state of Palestine and building the Riviera of the Middle East to replace the ruins caused by Israeli bombing. His idea does conjure a vision of fantastic possibility, just a pity that vision doesn’t involve jobs and a bright future for Gazans built with dollars in recompense for the smashed lives and infrastructure caused by US bombs and fighter planes supplied to Israeli defence forces.
Talking of aid, it doesn’t sound as if the world can hope for much help from America if Trump’s latest piece of bravado is realised. It has resulted, hopefully temporarily given legal challenges, in dismantling of the USAid agency for international development. Funds have been frozen and all but 600 of the 10,000 agency staff sent on leave. Those remaining are supposed to evaluate whether the aid designated for projects – some of them life-saving – are in America’s interest.
Similarly a reported 40,000 federal workers have already left service taking advantage of a one-off severance package from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) scheme headed by Trump’s new bestie Elon Musk who uses similar practices in his businesses. (Funny how sales of his Tesla have plummeted recently). The trouble is that for profit business motives and personal fantasies are not tailored to national and international needs.
Trump has never been keen on detail, preferring short verbal accounts to lengthy reports. “I am a very efficient guy, I want it short. I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability,” was his reaction to a report on the way the Chinese were taking advantage of the US. The kind of detail that has escaped him is that terminating the employment of federal workers has to be approved by Congress.
His own life is the embodiment of what he thinks are people’s dreams come true. A life filled with his version of success: wealth, fame, with beautiful women, private planes and ostentatious homes, like the Mar-a Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, where he has his official residence and he has owned since 1987. And then there is his own ‘must have’ ingredient: attention – attention not to detail but to himself.
Details come back to bite those who don’t regard them. Putting up tariff barriers may deter imports and move business back to the US, but it will also impact the cost of living there, pushing prices up, something that was a major issue in the election which brought Trump to power. There has already been a backtracking on the 25% tariffs Trump threatened to impose on imports Canada and Mexico.
The effects of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented migrants, or as he put it “fast-track the deportation of millions and millions of criminal aliens back to places from where they came”, is slower to gauge. But migrants tend to take on the jobs no one else wants to do. Remove them and who does the work?
The President’s move to impose economic and travel sanctions on members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and describing the court’s activities as “illegitimate” threatens the existence of an institution set up in 2002 to protect human rights and prosecute war crimes.
It’s not an institution that can be demolished like a building site.
