Only last month, Donald Trump told Americans: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” I can’t speak for God on this matter, but some of Trump’s God-fearing supporters apparently lost a little faith in their president after his Truth Social platform posted an AI-generated video, “WHAT’S NEXT” for Gaza.
As this masthead’s US correspondent, Michael Koziol, reported, one MAGA voter recoiled at seeing this 30-second clip, featuring Gaza rendered in Trump’s supposed image – complete with scantily clad bellydancers and the American leader sipping cocktails poolside with Bibi Netanyahu. “I have supported you since day one,” the MAGA voter responded, “but this is filth. There is no God in this.”
The AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza” may be a fantasy, but the president’s platform approves.Credit: Truth Social
The provenance of the clip, whether made for Truth Social or the equivalent of a retweet, was not clear, but Trump’s account plainly approved of the idea. After all, “Trump Gaza” – as it is renamed in the video – ventures not so far from the president’s declaration that the US would take over the strip and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
“I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza,” he said on February 9. In the video, his towering statue, all gold, looms over the gleaming streets.
This is an unfathomably cruel take on an epic and wrenching human tragedy. Gaza lays in ruins, all but uninhabitable. Yet many of its 2 million people are making their way home, determined to reinhabit their 365-square-kilometre sliver of hope. They may not recognise the wasteland, but nor do they recognise the garishly vulgar resortland of Trump Gaza. They wouldn’t, because the Gaza envisioned by Trump and, no doubt, Netanyahu, is one without any Palestinians in it.
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The idea of a Trump Gaza, a joke or not, is part of the process of disappearing Gaza, and the people of Gaza as well. Orwell had a term for this: The people and their land will go down a “memory hole”.
That’s just one of the Orwellian developments this week. The other is centred squarely in Washington, where tech billionaire Jeff Bezos issued a new rule to the opinion editor of The Washington Post, which he owns. From now on, he announced, the paper would promote “personal liberties and free markets” in its opinion pages. Opinion writers seen to challenge those principles will need to find a berth in another publication. After all, Bezos pointed out, the internet had a lot of other places for differing opinions. The Post’s editorials editor, David Shipley, promptly quit.
What’s wrong, you ask, with personal liberties and free markets? This is the Orwellian part. The issue is not those subjects, per se, but how one will define those subjects at a time when they will plainly be under attack by a US administration that Bezos has been prostrating himself before. (Just a few weeks ago, the paper spiked an editorial cartoon depicting Bezos doing just that.) No serious person thinks Trump’s cronies care about personal liberties or free markets. Bezos has set the stage for a new era of doublethink and newspeak. That’s why the respected Shipley left.
