If you’d like to read this issue on my website, click here! If you’d like to sign-up, and receive this in your inbox each week, click here! Read past issues here.
Good Friday Morning! This is especially true for whoever owns and found novels from the 1800s about “Baron Trump” and his many adventures. One of the novels includes a story about “The Last President.” The novels are driving the internet crazy, with conspiracy theorists claiming they’re proof of time travel.
Every day, there’s something new you just can’t make up.
My continuing thanks to those of you who subscribed to The American Almanac. We crossed more than 4,000 subscribers this week and are growing quickly. Thank you for subscribing, sharing, clicking the links, and visiting our sponsors. The subscription link is free and located here.
This week, I’m going to get into Trump’s declaration that the United States is taking over Gaza and how it reshapes the entire conversation – links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- A federal judge cut a deal Thursday allowing the DOGE guys to continue looking at Treasury Payments. The decision freezes the status quo, while everyone agrees they only have “read-only” access. That will allow the parties to argue further. Long-term, the judge will hear arguments from the unions on whether or not DOGE can be blocked from the system, but that’s a tenuous argument, at best. The Treasury Department is an executive branch agency, and the executive branch is ordering these guys in as executive branch employees. I can imagine some basiclimitation being put in place, but keeping the executive branch out of the Treasury or USAID – as liberals seem to believe they can do – is ludicrous on its face.
Where you can find me this week
Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter.
How To Measure Trump’s Trade War With Mexico, Canada, And China – Conservative Institute
Liberal Wake Up After Fours Years Of Slumber – Conservative Institute
Trump Takes Aim At Supreme Court Precedent – Conservative Institute
Trump Remakes The Middle East Consensus In One Speech
In case you missed it, the seismic shift this week was Trump declaring the United States would take over Gaza and move out all the Palestinians. When asked how it’d happen, he said Egypt, Jordan, and the other Arab countries would do it. And he rejected any possible rejection.
I’ve seen my liberal friends laugh at this, much like they laughed at the Gulf of America stuff. And I get it: Trump can be funny. But I assure you, the Arab countries believe this threat intimately, and Trump has single-handedly destroyed the biggest lie in the Middle East conflict: Palestine.
Lee Smith put it best in Tablet Magazine:
Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.
Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.
Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American president, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.
Trump pivoting to where he is now is stating the obvious: the two-state solution is dead. People were joking this week that the real two-state solution is the United States and Israel.
What’s frustrating is that Trump is saying the self-evident thing, which has been true for a long time. The last time Palestinians had a real shot at statehood was in 2000. Bill Clinton, for all his faults, had legitimately talked Israel into accepting Palestinian statehood with a myriad of promises and conditions favorable to the Palestinians.
In the 2000 Camp David Summit, Clinton had peace in the Middle East within his grasp. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat instead rejected that deal, walked away, and announced the Second Intifada. Clinton was stunned, furious, and humiliated.
Hamas took over a few years later. Clinton later remarked, “Having turned down a ‘once in a lifetime’ peace opportunity, ‘you can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open, and all the possibilities weren’t still there.'”
He’d know better than anyone else. The road to the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7 was set in motion after the Camp David talks in 2000. The two-state solution died that day.
The Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations all paid lip service to the idea. But in reality, the concept of a two-state solution was rejected by Palestinians. With the onslaught of October 7, they cannot live in the region.
Democrats and Arab states make bizarre claims that you can’t remove people from their homes. But Gaza isn’t a home. It’s a giant refugee camp. The only shot people have at a good life is leaving the refugee camps and getting someplace new to live.
All Trump did was yell the obvious: the Emporer has no clothes. And it doesn’t matter what Hamas or the old Palestinian groups think: their time is over. They chose war.
This week, I was reading coverage of the conflict and how Hamas was already declaring victory. With the refugee exchanges, Hamas believed it would get time to rebuild without harm from Israel. Keeping Gaza at its status quo guarantees another October 7 will happen.
And Trump is right – the United States has the economic and military power to force this to happen through sheer willpower. It’s a new Middle East, as John Podhoretz wrote:
What’s going on here? Simply the shifting of tectonic plates, not naturally, but through the force of will—the will to power, as Nietzsche might have put it. Yesterday, Trump asserted the will of the United States as the world’s most powerful, richest, most influential, and most dominant nation in saying something must be done about Gaza, here’s what needs to be done, here’s who’s going to pay for it, and here’s who’s going to manage it after. What must be done is it needs to be cleared and rebuilt. Who’s going to pay for it are the fellow Arabs who have been “supporting“ the Palestinians in order to keep the Palestinians far away from them. Who’s going to manage it after is the United States, really more as a real-estate management company than a political entity.
Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?
There’s no going back from this moment. This was like Reagan telling Gorbachev to tear down the wall. In one speech, Trump obliterated consensus and hurtled the entire region in a new direction.
How this sorts out is anyone’s guess, but we’re not returning to the status quo. And we should be thankful for that: a world where Hamas is forced to rebuild every few years is a far more dangerous one. It’s time to dig them up by the roots and remake the entire region.
Links of the week
USAID-Funded Pandemic Research Failed To Spot COVID or Ensure Chinese Transparency – Reason
The brief few minutes when J.D. Vance was President 47 – Volokh Conspiracy
Trump orders key government agency to cancel all media contracts – Axios
Betsy DeVos: Shut Down the Department of Education – The Free Press
Biden State Dept Privately Downplayed Use of ‘Jihad’ and ‘Occupation’ in UNRWA-Made Study Materials, Saying Only ‘Some Other Audiences’ View the Terms as ‘Inappropriate’ – Washington Free Beacon
CNN’s Scott Jennings: Trump’s Superpower Is Getting Democrats To Oppose Him On 80-20 Issues – RealClearPolitics
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Gender Ideology Has Impacted Society in Disastrous Ways – J.K. Rowling
Satire of the week
Fired FBI Agent Glumly Suction-Cup-Walks Down Side Of Building – Onion
Democrats Warn Trump’s Unelected Shadow Government Is Dismantling Their Unelected Shadow Government – Babylon Bee
Trump Becomes First Fascist In History To Reduce Size Of Government – Babylon Bee
Woman Who Forgot Own Social Security Number Just Grateful Elon Musk Knows It – Reductress
LA Fire Devastation Officially Reaches Bono Tribute Song Level – The Hard Times
New Mario Kart Course an Eerily Accurate Map of Your Home – The Hard Drive
Local Man Going To Show New Rural Speed Limits Who’s Boss – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!