The legacy media sounded the alarm over President Trump’s “preposterous” comments regarding his plans for the Gaza Strip.
During Tuesday’s joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump made international headlines when he revealed that the U.S. would “take over” and “level” Gaza, displacing the Palestinian population to other Arab countries while developing what Trump called the “riviera of the Middle East” in order to bring stability in the region. He added that Palestinians could return to Gaza once the development is complete, as well as “people of the world,” and didn’t rule out military intervention in order to implement his plans.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid was visibly shocked by the breaking news that aired during her show, repeatedly referring to Trump’s comments as “stunning.”
“We’re talking about potential occupation of the Gaza Strip, which has caused Israel to be at war in Gaza even before October 7th – the October 7th attacks. We’re talking about the United States taking over that position of occupation,” Reid said.
‘LEVEL IT’: TRUMP SAYS US WILL ‘TAKE OVER’ GAZA STRIP, REBUILD IT TO STABILIZE MIDDLE EAST
President Trump made international headlines after he revealed his plan for the US to “take over” the Gaza Strip. (Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Donald Trump is off-roading here, and he has no idea which direction is north,” Reid’s MSNBC colleague Alex Wagner reacted. “When thought of the sort of catastrophic iterations of Trump 2.0, this is the kind of stuff that people imagined.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes accused Trump of “backing explicit ethnic cleansing” and warned viewers to take him seriously.
“I think this is much more than riffing,” Hayes told colleague Rachel Maddow. “Now, whether there will be follow through, who knows? But I don’t think it was just off the cuff. I think this is an announcement of a new policy of this government.”
“I think one thing that we’re learning is everything is a trial balloon, right?” Maddow responded. “That everything that he says is to see what the reaction is, and then he even either says he didn’t mean it, or it was a joke, or he denies that he ever said it, or he goes ahead with it and start saying it more, we will see.”
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CNN correspondent Jeff Zeleny suggested Trump announcing plans to take over Gaza was meant to distract the country from the backlash his administration is receiving from the left, particularly for its overhaul of USAID.
“Meanwhile, across Washington, across the country and indeed the world, the government is being reshaped by Elon Musk, by others. So it’s unclear if this is something that – certainly is a provocative move that gives headlines that we should pay attention to it, of course – but also shining a light on this as opposed to what is actually happening in real time – the protest we can hear outside the White House here of course for the Israeli prime minister but also people protesting what [Trump’s] doing to this government,” Zeleny told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
Several members of the media sounded the alarm over Trump’s remarks at his joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ( REUTERS/Leah Millis)
CNN’s Jim Sciutto called Trump’s plan to displace the roughly two million Palestinians who live in Gaza “preposterous” and “illegal by any understanding of international law.”
“I’ve said for eight years, the thing that concerns me is beyond policy. Donald Trump doesn’t believe in rules and laws and norms or institutions,” CNN commentator David Axelrod later said. “He doesn’t believe them domestically. He doesn’t believe in them internationally, and he has defied them to get to this point and back to the presidency and I think he feels indomitable. And his attitude is, ‘we’ll take what we want to take. We’ll take Gaza, we’ll take Greenland, we’ll make Canada a state, we’ll take the Panama Canal.'”
“This is really a dangerous, dangerous attitude, just as it’s dangerous to say we’re going to walk in and take over agencies and dissolve agencies and decide how money is going to be spent regardless of what the Constitution says. There are implications to all of this that are very, very large for peace in the world, and large for a functioning democracy here at home,” Axelrod continued.
TRUMP EYES ABRAHAM ACCORDS EXPANSION, GAZA REBUILD WITH NETANYAHU MEETING ON DECK
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes accused Trump of “backing explicit ethnic cleansing” while CNN’s Jim Sciutto called his plan “preposterous.” (REUTERS/Leah Millis)
The Washington Post rushed to put a negative spin on its report of the press conference, saying Trump was “offering a vision of mass displacement likely to inflame sentiments in the Arab world.”
Time magazine chalked up Trump’s proposal as an “outlandish real-estate pitch” that would “upend a centuries-old conflict.”
“This Trump Plan for Gaza Is One of the Craziest Things I’ve Ever Heard” read the headline from Slate columnist Fred Kaplan, later writing “Trump’s vision is a caricature of ‘American-Zionist imperialism’ straight out of a Hamas leader’s imagination—only now, it seems, the actual American president has been imagining it all along.”
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The Atlantic contributing writer Jonathan Lemire similarly declared Trump’s proposal “the wildest and most improbable intervention by the United States in overseas affairs since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, more than 20 years ago.”
“The idea was breathtaking in its audacity, and it would be fair to say that its implementation would run into myriad obstacles at home and abroad, except that the overwhelming likelihood is that the U.S. would never come near implementing this notion,” Lemire wrote. “A direct American intervention in Gaza would radically expand the U.S. footprint in the Middle East, giving it possession of a territory devastated by 15 months of fighting between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces, ignited by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. And it could further destabilize a region never known for its stability.”
