After Donald Trump said on Tuesday night that the United States would be taking over Gaza — leveling it, clearing out its population, doing “a job” to rebuild it and supplying “unlimited numbers of jobs and housing” so “the world’s people” could live there — Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued Trump was just being generous.
“What President Trump announced yesterday is the offer, the willingness of the United States to become responsible for the reconstruction of that area,” Rubio, the nation’s top diplomat, said on Wednesday. “It’s an enormous undertaking.”
“It was not meant as a hostile move,” Rubio said at a press conference. “It was meant as a very generous move.”
Rubio is the latest Trump ally trying to cast the president’s recent obsession with expanding America’s borders in a positive light. Before recently becoming secretary of state, Rubio spent much of his time in the Senate advocating for self-determination and democracy for countries around the world. He ardently opposed Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s invasions of sovereign countries, and he worked to prepare self-governed, democratic Taiwan to defend itself against any attack by China. But he — and other Republicans who share similar views — now find themselves shepherding the priorities of a president who has threatened to use the military to claim Greenland and the Panama Canal and has repeatedly called for Canada to become the 51st state.
War-torn Gaza is just Trump’s latest target.
Democratic lawmakers are alarmed. They hope Republicans will urge Trump to stand down.
“I’ll be honest with you: He sounds like a warmonger,” Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, told NOTUS of Trump. “‘I want to annex Canada, I want to take over Panama, I want to invade Greenland, I want to occupy Gaza.’”
McGovern said he’s waiting for Rubio to redirect the administration’s manifest destiny dreams to forms of soft power, like foreign assistance — which the State Department has largely halted.
“It is beyond just kind of objectionable,” McGovern said.
People with ties to the region have pushed back on Trump’s idea.
“If the United States deploys troops to forcibly remove Muslims and Christians — like my cousins — from Gaza, then not only will the U.S. be mired in another reckless occupation but it will also be guilty of the crime of ethnic cleansing,” wrote Justin Amash, a former Republican House member from Michigan. “No American of good conscience should stand for this.”
While many Republicans have cast doubt on the idea, some of Amash’s old GOP congressional colleagues are willing to consider it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson praised Trump for being willing to make “a bold move” and said Republicans would “stand with the president on his initiative,” although he said he wants more details on the idea.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, a Florida Republican, told NOTUS on Wednesday that he doesn’t personally expect the U.S. to send troops to Gaza, but he praised Trump for thinking through the problem.
“I’ve heard a lot of hyperbole about this, which has been really laughable. You know, colleagues saying, ‘Oh, he’s going to walk people out at gunpoint or this and that,’” Mast said. “When you look at what’s going on there, you have people that have been relocated already for weeks or months that are returning, in some cases, to entire neighborhoods that are rubble because of the infestation of terrorists that were entirely around them.”
“Saying that it’s going to be rebuilt in this way, it’s a thoughtful thing to say,” he added.
Does Mast think Trump is complicating any U.S. messaging about Taiwan — or about any other adversaries trying to claim more land — by frequently sharing his own desire to expand America’s borders?
“He’s not claiming Greenland,” Mast replied. “He’s looking at what is the national security option as it relates to Greenland.”
“If there can be a better deal that’s made, that’s what we do,” he added.
—
Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.