Shawn Thew/ZUMA
On Tuesday, just before midnight, Donald Trump posted a grotesque AI-generated video on social media that depicts a future Gaza as his proposed “Riviera of the Middle East.” A sleek palm-tree-lined boulevard, in the video, is watched over by an enormous gold statue of the American president. Palestinians, it seems, are absent—aside from maybe a few belly dancers. In their place, a yassified Elon Musk eats hummus while Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lounge by the pool. A chintzy “Trump Gaza” hotel and cloying chant of “Trump Gaza is finally here!” round out the fantasy of Trump’s promise to criminally expel roughly two million people and take ownership of the enclave.
The video’s aesthetics, which mix the glass towers of Miami with the Dear-Leaderism of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, distract from a more fundamental reality: The president of the United States is using AI slop to sell war crimes and a potential genocide he considers a real estate deal. It is pitching ethnic cleansing with a meme.
Trump just posted a “Trump Gaza” propaganda video featuring a giant golden statue of himself, dancing bearded women, and himself partying with a woman who is not his wife. pic.twitter.com/4FWn175PSj
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) February 26, 2025
Gazans, most of whom are refugees descended from residents expelled from what is now Israel, have made abundantly clear that they do not want to be forced from their land once again. Nor, as Trump has called for doing, do they want to be barred from ever returning—particularly to make way for an American-owned Mediterranean style escape for global elites.
The only way to accomplish Trump’s plan would be to commit atrocities that evoke some of the darkest moments in contemporary history. And it would require doing so in the wake of a war in which Israel—with the help of American bombs—has reduced much of Gaza to rubble and killed more than 62,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 children.
On paper, Trump’s plan is being taken seriously by his underlings. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, are talking about bringing real estate executives together to hatch a plan to rebuild the enclave. The pair reportedly want to hold a White House summit devoted to the topic that, according to the Journal, “would include a public display, potentially with large cranes and other showy pieces of equipment.” The planning follows Trump’s claim during the campaign that Gaza could be “better than Monaco” because it has “the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything.”
For now, Trump’s vision of America controlling an ethnically cleansed Gaza appears to be mostly fantasy. The more immediate risk is the signal sent to Netanyahu and his hard-right allies. Extreme Jewish supremacists like Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been calling for Israel to resettle Gaza, now know they have even less reason to fear that the United States will do anything if and when they steal even more land from Palestinians.
