The Trump News Machine

The tariff war gets a pause as the standoff in Gaza takes a wild turn while many hostages desperately wait for Phase Two

Remember the days of GW Bush, Obama or Biden? When days would go by and you would have to work very hard to find them making news? When your world was sort of quiet? No more. We are back to a White House that is relentlessly dominating the news cycle, in your face. We are not being asked; we are part of the daily blasts and Trump is now signing executive orders at the pace in which he tweeted in his first term. And if not signing anything he is either launching new policies or just spitballing. Yesterday things were taken to an entirely new level and as I was writing this a wild press conference on Gaza made me realize it was already outdated. You need to be able to pivot fast in Trump’s world.

Tariffs

But let’s start here. The ‘tariff drama’ ended, or better say paused, pretty quickly with a 30-day postponement so that Canada and Mexico could clean up their border act. And while Trump supporters billed it as a total win, what Canada offered in return really is weak tea. A border package of $1.3 billion that was in the works anyway, the appointment of a ‘Fentanyl Czar’ and listing Mexican drug cartels as terrorists. Given the total panic in Canada it is clear that Trump could have extracted a lot more from Trudeau and we will have to see what will happen if the threat resurfaces in early March. But it is clear that Trump was also under domestic pressure to relent and settle in order to save face and not unecessarily disrupt two vibrant economies. As I pointed out earlier, trust between the two countries has of course eroded and the Americans may retry and use this chaos to go for another ask. Like asking Canada to up its defence budget or some increased market access for US products. We will see.

Gaza

At a certain level the Trump machine creates both facts and future plans and the latter can easily be traded away if the situation so requires. Trump is not crazy; he is unorthodox and just totally happy to go where no one has gone before in pushing his agenda. He has a set of shrewd advisors and despite the fact that a lot of his actions are contradictory, there is some method to the madness.

Take his insistence, now voiced twice, that it is time to clean out Gaza and deport all of its Arab citizens to Egypt and Jordan. Yesterday after meeting with Nethanyahu he doubled down on this and made it clear that the US would indeed take over Gaza. Yes, the man who campaigned on a retreating US from the world stage is now advocating to turn Gaza into a sort of dependent territory like Puerto Rico. Nation building, remember that?

Crazy? Maybe, but it is doing a few important things. At a high level he is basically saying that what many people have thought forever and never dared expressing out loud: a taboo is gone. It allows for a debate in which various policy options can now be explored, it engages both the Arab world and Israel in an unprecedented manner.

And in doing so he (1) creates a new approach to resolving the conflict and (2) puts something on the table that may later be traded away during negotiations. So cleaning out Gaza and a US presence there may actually never ever happen, but just threatening it could provide magic in removing obstacles in the ongoing hostage and ceasefire negotiations. Or in talks with Saudi Arabia. Or in both.

Yes, there is some very obvious Trump real estate development thinking that is informing his Gaza comments. And that is something some of the Arab Gulf states would also be interested in. Like many others the president is able to visualize a prosperous coastline with hotels and casinos, raking in the dollars from visiting tourists from all over the world. Such a brand new Gaza is based on the idea that a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the end will be a purely economic one, not one of land. Next up is Elon Musk setting up incubators and accelerators in the West Bank.

And More …

And aside from tariffs and Gaza, Trump this week also pulled funding from the one UN agency which has consumed billions without delivering any measure of peace while aiding and abetting Hamas: UNRWA. And for good measure Trump also dropped the American membership of the UN’s Human Rights Council while signing an order that isolates and sanctions Iran even further. In just two days the Middle East got redefined. That brings us back to the people on the ground.

The Hostage Deal

The hostage releases continued, last weekend we witnessed the emotional return of Yarden Bibas, Ofer Kalderon and Keith Siegel. To date there have been a total of eighteen who have seen their ordeal end and who were able to come home and embrace their families. To be clear: this would not have happened without Donald Trump exercising his powers.

This coming Saturday another three are slated to be returned as Phase One winds its way to a conclusion on or before March 1 at which point there will still be fifty-nine (seventy-nine today) hostages left. Discussion of what Phase Two will look like have only just started and this is of course another scenario from hell for the families of those remaining hostages. Among them is Omri Miran and his wife Lishan Miran-Lavi took to ‘X’ a few days ago to describe the pain to know that Omri is only part of the next phase of releases.

Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Daniela Gilboa and Naama Levy came home today as in really home, after some time in the hospital to recuperate. They have indicated they want to rejoin their military units in two weeks time.

Finally, there are so many heartwarming and emotional videos after each hostage release and I will share the ones that really made an impact. This one, Keith Siegel reuniting with his daughters is one for the books:

Photos: Trump and Nethanyahu in the Oval Office yesterday, February 4, 2025. Liri Albag returns home with her mother today, February 5, 2025.