Trump’s Casino Colonialism
President Trump’s proposal that the United States assume ownership of Gaza has elicited shock and outrage in equal measure. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump declared at a news conference on February 4. Describing the seaside enclave as a “demolition site,” Trump suggested that the entire Palestinian population be permanently displaced and he promised to transform Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Trump’s declaration surprised even top White House officials, who spent the remainder of the week serving up reassuring messages that U.S. soldiers would not be deployed to Gaza and that U.S. taxpayers would not pay for the enclave’s reconstruction. But the damage was done. Abroad, Trump’s plan has threatened an already fragile ceasefire in Gaza; predictably, Hamas refused to countenance a mass expulsion of Gaza’s 2 million residents, while the governments of Egypt and Jordan quickly reiterated their opposition to absorbing Palestinian refugees. Trump’s plan, noted one regional expert, “makes annexing Canada and buying Greenland seem much more practical in comparison.”
The focus among pundits and policymakers on the feasibility of the president’s Gaza scheme misses a deeper significance. Trump’s declaration illuminated a worldview rooted in both America’s long history of settler colonialism and Trump’s own past as a real estate mogul. The result is a uniquely toxic brew. Let’s call it “casino colonialism.”
In recent years, scholars have turned to the framework of settler colonialism to understand the logic of U.S. violence against Native Americans. Unlike forms of colonialism in which the colonizers exploit the local population to enrich themselves, settler colonialism is predicated on removing indigenous people, taking the land, and repopulating it with settlers. The expansion of the United States across the North American continent resulted in the dispossession of hundreds of Native American nations. Between the 1830s and the 1850s alone, an estimated 88,000 Native Americans were forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi with as many as 17,000 dying of deprivation, disease, and malnutrition. This process generated a belief in “Manifest Destiny,” framing complex Native American societies as bands of animalistic savages and ennobling Anglo-American settlers as hardy pioneers with the God-given mission to civilize an unpopulated wilderness. At the dawn of the twentieth century, surviving indigenous communities were sequestered on reservations, their movement restricted, cultural practices repressed, and economic opportunities stifled.
The legacy of U.S. settler colonialism is evident in Donald Trump’s depiction of Gaza as an uninhabitable wasteland. “I mean, they’re there because they have no alternative,” he told reporters, referring to the Palestinians. “What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now.” In this framing, not only is Israel’s role in causing the destruction of Gaza rendered invisible, so too is the Made in America stamp on much of the Israeli arsenal; a recent report estimates that U.S. spent over $17.9 billion on aid for Israeli military operations in the 12-months following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terror attack. Echoing the depictions of Native Americans by the advocates of Manifest Destiny, Trump’s initiative assumes that the Palestinians in Gaza are essentially rootless, and, like the champions of Native American removal, Trump dreams of seizing Gaza and relocating its inhabitants to some distant locale. “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure,” Trump said. “I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza.”
On another level, Trump’s vision for Gaza reflects his own history of shady real estate deals and financial speculation. With its Mediterranean shoreline, the Las Vegas-sized Gaza Strip presents Trump and his close associates with mouthwatering opportunities for tourist development. As Trump’s son-in-law, Jerod Kushner, asserted in a March 2024 interview, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods.” The beneficiaries of that wealth, however, would most likely not be Palestinians, who Kushner suggested could be moved to the Negev desert. On Tuesday, Trump echoed Kushner, declaring that “everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.” As White House officials struggled to walk-back the president’s scheme, David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, enthused about Gaza’s “25 miles of sunset-facing beachfront.”
Trump’s dystopian vision of a Gaza without Palestinians thus echoes the logic of elimination that underpinned U.S. settler colonialism. Unlike the champions of Manifest Destiny, however, the imagined settlers of Trump’s casino colonialism are not wagon trains of hardy pioneers but Wall Street investment firms and billionaire capitalists. It’s a scenario that Trump knows first-hand. In the 1990s, Trump’s casino empire in Atlantic City failed miserably, yet he managed to amass enormous personal wealth and leave shareholders holding the debts. Now as president, Trump has more money to play with and far less accountability. But for the residents of Gaza, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
