Feb. 6: Trump Repeats Gaza Plan as Aides Try to Walk It Back

John Robb on Elon and Trump; FCC releases unedited Kamala "60 Minutes"; Pam Bondi freezes sanctuary city funding

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The Big Story

President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip and resettle its inhabitants throughout the region is so explosive that many are having trouble taking it literally—including Trump’s cabinet officials. As we reported yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and even certain Israeli officials have attempted to walk back or water down Trump’s proposal. Rubio said on Fox that Trump was merely suggesting that the United States could clean the place up so that the Gazans could move back home. Israelis, according to NPR, are taking Trump’s claims with a “grain of salt,” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox on Wednesday evening that Palestinians could “relocate and come back” after the cleanup.

But, as if he wasn’t clear enough already, Trump reaffirmed his position once more this morning in a post on Truth Social.

So Trump is not allowing his surrogates to moderate his position to make it more palatable to the old guard of American—or Israeli—foreign policy. The foreign policy establishment has been so attached to the notion of a two-state solution for so long (not to mention, the Iran deal under Obama and Biden) that it fails to understand what Trump is offering, which is an end to the Israel-Palestine conflict. As Tablet News Editor Tony Badran wrote on X today:

The writer Fred Siegel coined the term riot ideology to describe how liberal politicians in the United States responded to the riots and urban disorder of the 1960s-80s. Essentially, every time a city would be burned down in the name of racial justice, liberal legislators would respond not by punishing the rioters but by blaming themselves (or local authorities) for creating the conditions that led people to riot, according to the principle of “implied suffering”—i.e., the idea that “people acting badly is de facto proof they have been mistreated.” So bad behavior led to more money and resources, in the form of social welfare and other types of aid. A parallel can be made to Washington’s treatment of the Palestinians during the decades of the “peace process.” After every new round of conflict, the United States offers aid and political concessions to the Palestinians, insulating them from the consequences of defeat and reinforcing the idea that violence leads to concessions. What Trump is offering is an end to that cycle, an end to the old rules of foreign policy, and a possibility for a future that the old guard of foreign policy is ill-equipped to understand.

There’s a concept lurking in certain corners of X that the “woke are more correct than the mainstream.” The idea is that the left (the “woke”) and the right will often agree on the question but offer completely opposed answers, while the mushy center obscures the problem and offers a neutered conclusion. This was on full display in the Democrats’ extreme reaction to Trump’s proposal, which was more consistent with the reality of his messaging than Republicans’ attempts to tone-massage his statement were. Texas Congressman Al Green (no relation to the singer of “Let’s Stay Together” fame) announced Wednesday that he’d be introducing articles of impeachment against the president, citing “ethnic cleansing” regarding Trump’s Gaza plan. In an interview with Chris Hayes, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland called Trump’s proposal “ethnic cleansing by another name”: “This declaration will give ammunition to Iran and other adversaries while undermining our Arab partners in the region.”

The proposal did have at least one defender—Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who seems less interested in satisfying his Democrat colleagues with every passing week. “The Palestinians have refused, or they’ve been unwilling to deliver a government that provided security and economic development for themselves,” said Fetterman in an interview with Jewish Insider. “They allowed 10/7 to occur, and now Gaza has to be rebuilt. Where are the people going to live? Where are they going to go? So it’s part of a conversation with where they’re at right now.”

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The Rest

→In our Tweet of the Day, media theorist John Robb explains the Trump administration’s “online maneuver warfare”:

→On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission released the full, unedited version of the infamous 60 Minutes interview with former presidential candidate Kamala Harris that critics said was doctored and edited to appear more favorable to Harris. The FCC is investigating the 60 Minutes broadcaster for possible election interference, and Trump is suing it for $10 billion for what he claims was the network’s deceptive editing of the interview. CBS posted the video to its website, defending the edits made to the Harris interview as standard practice for “time, space, or clarity.”

Critics aren’t buying the network’s explanation. A source at CBS told the New York Post off the record that the network did Harris “a lot of favors” in making Harris’ answers more coherent: “Feels like a cleanup on Aisle 7, one could argue news distortion,” said the source. In a post on X, investigative journalist and former CBS employee Catherine Herridge agreed that CBS did Harris a “favor” by trimming her “word salad” responses, but said it was not a “journalistic foul”—though she was also skeptical that Trump would have received the same treatment.

→Attorney General Pam Bondi, confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday and sworn in on Wednesday, used her first two hours in her position to order the Justice Department to freeze federal funding of 220 sanctuary cities. She also ordered the department’s attorneys to start prosecuting city officials refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Bondi’s orders, issued in a memo Wednesday, include an immediate 60-day pause on distribution of funds, with a report on further steps due on her desk in 45 days. According to the New York Post, Bondi’s orderthe measure could prove to be another financial hurdle to cities like New York that receive small shares of funding flows from the Justice Department and are already financially strapped due to providing housing and services to the migrants who swarmed to the cities over the course of the Biden administration. (According to the Department of Homeland Security, at least 10 million flowed into the country from 2021 to 2024.) Bondi’s first-day directives also included reorienting department work to focus on stricter punishments and ending DEI at the Justice Department, according to CBS.

→Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced Thursday that Israel would be departing from the United Nations Human Rights Council, following a similar decision made by the United States on Tuesday. In a letter addressed to UNHRC President Jürg Lauber, Reuters reports, Starr cited what it calls the UNHRC’s rampant institutional bias against Israel as the reason for the exit. Trump signed his executive order to cut ties with UNHRC on Tuesday, when Netanyahu visited the White House.

→Stat of the Day: 79%

That’s the percentage of Americans supportive of Trump’s decision to ban transgender women from women’s sports, according to a poll conducted by CNN. Rarely, as the CNN broadcast highlights, are so many Americans ever in agreement. The stat shows how deeply toxic trans issues have become, as opposition to trans women in women’s sports was 61 percent in 2021. Nothing Trump has ever done has been as popular as his decision to ban trans women from female athletic events.

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