Trump’s “Finish the Genocide” Plan: The Ugly American on Steroids

By Kevin Barrett, for Crescent International

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt orchestrated World War II, defeated the British Empire by stealth, seized its gold and usurped its position as the world’s number one power, the Ugly American has (in his own mind at least) bestrode the world. And who is this Ugly American? According to Wikipedia: “’Ugly American’ is a stereotype depicting American citizens as exhibiting loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior.”

It is safe to say that in the whole history of Ugly Americans, there has never been one as ugly as Donald J. Trump. And in America’s 75 ugly years of world domination, featuring the murder of roughly 60 million people in CIA and military interventions, never have uglier words escaped the blood-dripping foam-flecked mouth of a US leader than Trump’s lunatic babbling about finishing the Gaza genocide.

Following up on campaign vows to “finish the job” and “clean it (Gaza) out,” on January 26 Trump said he wanted to “just clean the whole thing out” by forcing Gazans into Egypt and Jordan. Though the nonplussed Jordanian and Egyptian governments, not to mention Gazans, immediately rejected the idea, Trump repeated it on January 27, 30, and 31, saying he expected Jordan and Egypt to acquiesce. Then before and after his meeting with Netanyahu on February 4, Trump doubled down, saying “I don't know how they could want to stay (in Gaza),” adding “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip. ... We'll own it.” He even vowed to use US troops “if necessary.”

Trump insisted that ethnically cleansed Gazans would never be allowed to return to the future US-owned enclave. Then the next day his own press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, contradicted him, saying the Gazans’ expulsion would only be temporary.

On February 11 Trump summoned Jordanian King Abdullah to Washington and vowed to steal Gaza from its people without paying a dime: “We will have Gaza. No reason to buy. There is nothing to buy. It's Gaza. It's a war-torn area. We're going to take it. We're going to hold it.” King Abdullah, quaking in fear (of his own people’s reaction) forcefully said “no,” presumably while devoting superhuman effort to refrain from rolling his eyeballs.

It is safe to say that no-one of any significance, perhaps not even Trump himself, takes Trump’s Gaza “plan” seriously. All relevant world leaders have forcefully rejected it, with one exception: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who sees Trump’s crazed vision as a political lifeline. Though Netanyahu certainly doesn’t expect the US to expel Palestinians and take over Gaza, he can sell Trump’s gibberish to his ultra-genocidal ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as an indirect endorsement of their millenarian-messianic wish to murder and expel all Palestinians from historic Palestine in preparation for the coming of their Messiah, a Jewish military leader who will, they believe, conquer the world for the Jews, exterminate or enslave all non-Jews, and rule the Earth from a blood sacrifice temple in Occupied Jerusalem.

Netanyahu is a canny politician, not a messianic lunatic like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. He doesn’t expect a messiah to solve his political problems any more than he expects Trump to make good on his promises to expel the Gazans. Instead, the Israeli Prime Minister knows that by feeding Smotrich and Ben-Gvir genocide fantasies like Trump’s, he can prevent them from resigning from his cabinet and bringing down his government. If Smotrich and Ben-Gvir bail out, Netanyahu will go to prison on corruption charges. So placating them is a high priority, and Trump’s genocidal hallucinations fit the bill.

Trump’s deranged Gaza rants are political payback for the Adelson crime family’s $100 million dollar bribe. Gangster widow Miriam Adelson forked over the cash on behalf of the extremist Likudnik wing of the Zionist movement, so Trump now feels obliged to deliver the goods. But what goods can he actually deliver? Certainly not a depopulated Gaza. So what is Trump really after? Aside from helping Netanyahu cling to power, Trump may also be initiating negotiations with a typical Trumpian ploy: staking out a seemingly insane position in hopes of disorienting his negotiating partners and thereby gaining an advantage.

That’s the implication of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s follow-up to Trump’s Gaza ramblings: “All these countries say how much they care about the Palestinians. If the Arab countries have a better plan, then that’s great.” The New York Times reported that regional Arab countries are responding:

Representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are quietly coordinating to form an alternative vision for Gaza in which Arab countries would help fund and oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, while keeping its residents in place and preserving the possibility of a Palestinian state…Envoys from all five countries are set to flesh out the details on Friday in Saudi Arabia, and then again at a bigger summit on March 4 in Cairo. At those meetings, Egypt will probably propose forming a committee of Palestinian technocrats and community leaders, all unaffiliated with Hamas, who could run Gaza after the war.

Those proposals by US-occupied or quasi-occupied Arab countries face numerous obstacles. But compared to Trump’s genocidal babbling, the Arab plan seems relatively realistic. And that may be why Trump floated the ludicrous finish-the-genocide plan in the first place.

Trump’s wildly unrealistic genocide threats were presumably intended to put pressure on Hamas and its backers. The Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, far from being defeated and annihilated as Netanyahu promised, is as strong or stronger today than it was on October 6, 2023, as US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken admitted four days before Trump’s inauguration. Having won on the battlefield, Hamas is unlikely to voluntarily disband. So by threatening Gazans with total annihilation, Trump may be attempting to strengthen the hand of Arab leaders who want to convince Hamas to give up at least some of its power as a fig leaf for Israel conceding defeat.

“Israel”’s Zugzwang

But will Israel admit defeat, no matter how many fig leaves it is given? The Zionist entity, after almost a year and a half of genocide, finds itself in a position akin to what chess players call a zugzwang: a situation where any move makes things worse. Facing the reality that it has been defeated on the battlefield by courageous underdogs, and that every day it continues to commit genocide further erodes its legitimacy and long-term prospects, the Zionists may be tempted to listen to their own messianic-millenarian extremists and “flee forward” into a big regional and perhaps global war—a catastrophe which would offer them their only conceivable hope of mass-murdering seven million Palestinians and expelling the handful of survivors.

The apocalyptic fantasy that the Jewish nation will emerge from an unimaginably destructive war to subjugate non-Jews and rule the world has been around for centuries. Messianic-millenarian rabbis believe such a war is a requirement to bring on their messiah. Such end-times ravings have been picking up steam during recent decades, as Israel’s Orthodox Jews have demographically outpaced their secular counterparts.

Is Israel turning away from reality towards apocalyptic fantasy as a response to its geopolitical zugzwang? Many cultures throughout history have walked that path, and it generally hasn’t ended well. In the late 19^thcentury, Native Americans danced the Ghost Dance in an effort to trigger an apocalyptic transformation that would reverse the white man’s conquest and bring back the buffalo. Like today’s messianic-millenarian rabbis, those Native Americans confronted a historical reality that was inexorably moving in an unfavorable direction.

“Israel,” like the 19^th-century Native Americans, faces a highly uncertain future due to world-historical changes far beyond anyone’s control. The Zionist entity’s first 75 years occurred in a relatively favorable geopolitical environment characterized by US imperial hegemony. Though the genocidal Jewish settler colony’s usurpation of the Holy Land was never accepted, and will never be accepted, by the people of the region, the wishes of those people didn’t matter, because Zionist Jews were able to gain power over the US government and use the global hegemon’s power to force Zionism down the throat of a protesting world.

Today US global hegemony is fading. The coming multipolar world will be dominated by the Global South and its leading great power, China, which retains a bitter memory of the abusive Western colonialism that has now reached its apotheosis with the genocide of Gaza. During the next few decades the shifting geopolitical balance of power will create an international environment that will be radically less favorable to “Israel” than the previous US-dominated global order was. And the more abysmally “Israel” behaves, the more wars it causes and the more genocides it perpetrates, the more anti-Zionist the emerging post-American global order will be.

So “Israel” faces a stark choice: (1) admit defeat and allow Gaza to be rebuilt, with Hamas enduring and hence victorious despite whatever fig leaves disguise that fact; or (2) flee forward into ever-more-apocalyptic war and genocide, thereby guaranteeing that the emerging post-American world will soon terminate the Zionist experiment “with extreme prejudice.” Either way, the writing is on the wall for the Zionist entity, and no amount of obscenely genocidal bluster emanating from Ugly American Trump can disguise that fact.

---

Stripe is Substack’s only processor and they debanked me, so you can no longer pay me through Substack. Now I am posting everything on Substack free and asking people to sign up for recurring donations at my Paypal donation page…or better yet, the free speech platform SPdonate. Note that you may need to do a recurring larger recurring annual donation ($100 suggested) not a small monthly one, because SPdonate can’t process anything under $20.