From The Riviera To The Sea

Trump's Gaza plan is everything that's wrong with Trump.

It shouldn’t be possible for a guy with over $50 million in the bank to make us feel bad about his financial problems.

But in his 2020 comedy special, Unforgiven, Dave Chappelle pulled it off by calling out the only group of people more obnoxious than whining multi-millionaires: bullies.

Dave tells the story of himself as a fifteen-year-old kid, just starting out in comedy. An older comedian, a comedy veteran, asks if he can “borrow” one of Dave’s most popular jokes, just once, for an audition at a different club.

And while you’re probably aware of how hard it is to get something back once the wrong person “borrows” it, Dave was too young and naive to understand any of that. So he says, “Sure.”

Predictably enough, a few weeks later, Dave catches the comedian “borrowing” his joke again during a standup performance. And when Dave confronts him, when he refuses to hand over his hard work, the man stands up, towering over Dave’s scrawny, fifteen-year-old frame.

“Really? I can just take it,” he says.

And he does.

Dave was too small to fight back, there’s no court of appeal for stolen jokes, so the bully just…gets away with it. And even though he’s now thirty-two years older and millions of dollars richer, he still thinks about the pain of that moment every day:

That was the first time that someone ever did that to me […] where someone would intimidate me or scare me and take something that I believed was mine.

By the time Dave contrasts this experience with the theft of Chapelle’s Show, everybody in the audience is on board. Because once you’ve felt that terrible feeling of someone taking what’s yours, you won’t let anybody intimidate you or scare you into doing it again.

It shouldn’t be possible for a guy who bragged about spying on underage girls as they undressed and lied his way to an insurrection, to fall below the expectations of decency that most people have set for him.

But Donald Trump pulled it off last week by unveiling his plans to “own” Gaza and permanently displace the surviving Palestinian population so he can turn their homes into the Arabian Mar-a-Lago.

“This could be the Riviera of the Middle East,” he said.

And while you’re probably aware that the Geneva Convention prohibits, “individual or mass forcible transfers […] regardless of their motive,” while you might have noticed that Trump’s plan is such a textbook example of ethnic cleansing that even a few Republicans have found the courage to admit that there are “a couple of kinks in that slinky,” Trump is too Trump-esque to see anything beyond the opportunity to build some gold casinos with his name on them.

Because this is the mindset of people who believe they can “just take” things.

It’s the same mindset as Theodor Herzl who insisted that the colonisation of Palestine would bring nothing but benefits to the native Arab population while plotting to “gently expropriate” them.

The same mindset behind the oft-repeated claim that “Palestine was never a country,” as if people who have been living on a piece of land for thousands of years only gain the right of self-determination if we in the West deign to grant it.

The same mindset that is conspicuously absent whenever Trump is asked what he’ll “demand” from someone who is at least as big a bully as he is and isn’t naive and scrawny enough to intimidate.

Do you know why people like me find bullies like Trump so objectionable?