4 Explanations for Trump’s Shocking Gaza Proposal

Breaking down the president’s suggestion — and whether it’s a distraction, a negotiating ploy or something more.

by Aaron Blake / Washington Post / Feb. 5, 2025

President Donald Trump on Tuesday offered the most untethered idea of an increasingly untethered second term.

Trump said at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States “will take over the Gaza Strip,” will “own it” long-term and will redevelop it — even floating turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump’s promise has shocked the Middle East, Trump’s opponents and his domestic allies alike. Pursuing such a course would mean the displacement of 2 million Palestinians from their land — Trump proposed setting up “various domains” for them elsewhere — and injecting Americans into the cauldron of the Middle East.

It would also in all likelihood require a massive mobilization of U.S. troops, despite Trump’s years-long attacks on the concept of foreign nation-building.

The immediate question is, of course, whether he’s actually serious. Here are a few theories.

1. It’s a distraction

It’s been an often-overwrought criticism of media coverage of Trump for years that the wild ideas he floats are just “distractions” — things that are intended to avert journalists’ and the public’s gaze from other, more prosaic and boring but more legitimate controversies.

But just because that theory has been overwrought doesn’t mean it’s not a real strategy. And there’s no question that Trump, more than ever, is “flooding the zone” with bold (and often legally dubious) actions that challenge everyone to keep up.

“It’s working,” former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon told my colleagues late last month. “It’s just stunning to me what they’re doing, and it’s not getting covered because it’s too much. They’re overwhelming the system.”

Trump’s announcement very notably came even as the opposition has suddenly mobilized much more to combat his and Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the government.
Just before Trump made his announcement, The Washington Post reported on how many of Musk’s maneuvers to seize control of massive government functions could well be illegal. The New York Times’s Charlie Savage has a good piece in the same vein about how Trump has “opened the throttle on defying legal limits.”

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,” David Super, a law professor at Georgetown Law School, told The Post.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York) are both urging everyone not to play along.

“I have news for you — we aren’t taking over Gaza,” Murphy posted on X late Tuesday. “But the media and the chattering class will focus on it for a few days and Trump will have succeeded in distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

But as ever with Trump, the dilemma is determining what’s real and what’s not. And ignoring proposals like this are perilous, too. What if he actually does intend to send U.S. troops to Gaza, but that didn’t get a thorough airing because we assumed it was a bluff?

And even Trump merely floating this idea has the potential to reignite a region where we just saw a peace deal, by suggesting the mass and permanent displacement of Palestinian Arabs from their land. Other Arab counties are already rebuking that.

We’ve also seen before how some of Trump’s wilder ideas have been dismissed as unserious, only to have him follow through.

2. It’s a negotiating ploy

A related but slightly different theory is that this is indeed a ploy — but one intended for the Middle East rather than the domestic political debate. In that way, it would be similar to Trump’s recent threats of huge tariffs on Canada and Mexico, only for him to pull back for seemingly modest concessions.

This could be Trump threatening the unthinkable to force Middle Eastern countries to pursue a more sustainable peace. It would basically be: If you guys can’t figure it out, we’re coming in. Could that spur Hamas to be more willing to cede power? Could it apply pressure on Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, stop insisting on a Palestinian state and help in the postwar process? Those appear to be some of the more likely aims.

Netanyahu, notably, didn’t explicitly endorse Trump’s plan and treated it more as an idea than a firm U.S. intention. He praised Trump’s “willingness to puncture conventional thinking” but suggested his ideas might not align.

“He has a different idea, and I think it’s worth paying attention to this,” Netanyahu said. “We’re talking about it. He’s exploring it with his people, with his staff.”
And don’t forget that, while Trump has been decidedly un-Reagan in his approach to asserting U.S. leadership worldwide, he’s made it clear he sees his moves in the Middle East as a big part of his legacy.

3. He’s leaning into the madman theory even more

You might remember in Trump’s first term that people often invoked the “madman theory.” The idea is basically to make other countries believe you’re completely unpredictable and capable of anything, to keep them in line. Richard M. Nixon employed it in his dealings with the Soviet Union.

And Trump clearly sees the benefit of this.

In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Trump responded thusly to a question about using military force to protect Taiwan from China and its president, Xi Jinping:

“I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and he knows I’m f—ing crazy,” Trump said of Xi.

A longtime Trump adviser echoed that in comments to Axios late Tuesday. “He’s moving the goal posts of crazy,” the adviser said. “This time around, he’s not intimidated by headlines or pundits: He’s gonna throw out there whatever he feels like throwing out there.”

4. His sudden imperialist streak is very real

There is no question that threatening an occupation of Gaza is anathema to how Trump has pitched his foreign policy for many years. Trump has emphasized “America First” and said the United States had no business nation-building in the Middle East.

“Our policy of never-ending war, regime change, and nation-building is being replaced by the clear-eyed pursuit of American interests,” he said in 2019.
He said repeatedly in 2016 that the “era of nation-building” had ended.
Trump is now not only talking about nation-building, but what critics have said would necessarily amount to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
But in a way, it’s of a piece with his increasingly imperialistic tendencies.
He’s talked more earnestly about claiming Greenland and the Panama Canal — even leaving open the possibility of using military coercion to do it. He’s talked about making Canada the 51st state. He devoted part of his inaugural address two weeks ago to the idea of “manifest destiny” — the idea being that U.S. expansion is our divine right.
And in comments that quickly resurfaced late Tuesday, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in March said that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.” He suggested one could “move the people out and then clean it up.”

Nobody espouses the potential of “waterfront property” like Trump, who on Tuesday echoed his son-in-law’s comments by saying Gaza could be “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
It’s possible all of this imperialistic talk is bluster. But it’s also possible that Trump feels freed up in his second term, after years of leveraging “America First” for political gain, to change it up and make the expansion of the United States (in areas he actually cares about) a key plank of his legacy.
And to the extent he does aim for that, there will surely be fewer guardrails. Gone are the establishment foreign policy minds from his first administration who surely would have cautioned him against things like this. While Senate Republicans often resisted Trump’s foreign policy impulses from 2017 through 2021, they’ve demonstrated significantly less will to fight him in a second term.
In other words, who knows? But it’s probably worth understanding his motivations and what this threat — even if it’s just a threat — could mean.