Jan. 31: Trump Triples Down on Gazan Resettlement

New details in Potomac crash; Tulsi v. Trump on Syria; Holocaust denial in the UFC

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The Big Story

For the third time in a week, President Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon reiterated his demand that Egypt and Jordan accept refugees from Gaza. Here was his exchange with a reporter:

Reporter: The president [of Egypt] and the king of Jordan have both said that they won’t take in displaced people from Gaza like you suggested. Is there anything you can do to make them do that? I mean, tariffs against those countries, for example?

Trump: They will do it. They will do it.

Reporter: What makes you say that?

Trump: They’re gonna do it, okay? We do a lot for them, and they’re gonna do it.

Trump’s remarks—his most forceful yet on the subject—came one day after Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi said that the “displacement of Palestinians” can “never be tolerated or allowed because of its impact on Egyptian national security.” And the comments might have made Sisi nervous. On Friday, Reuters reported, “thousands of people demonstrated at the Rafah border crossing” in a “rare state-sanctioned protest.” According to Egyptian security sources, “Parties close to Sisi had sent buses to ferry protesters to the border crossing, where civilian movement is typically restricted, but said the outpouring expressed public and not just leadership disapproval of Trump’s proposal.”

Such outpourings of organic popular sentiment aside, Trump is correct that “we do a lot for them.” Not to mention that, as Jonathan Schanzer and Mariam Wahba explain in a Friday article in Newsweek, Egypt has not been on its best behavior in recent years. For one thing, Israel’s seizure of the Philadelphi Corridor last year exposed Cairo as deeply complicit in the smuggling of weapons into Gaza prior to Oct. 7. And Egypt appears to be getting into the habit of snubbing Washington, per Schanzer and Wahba:

In 2023, leaked intelligence revealed Egypt's secret plans to supply rockets to Russia in flagrant defiance of U.S. policy. In October 2024, at the height of Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Sisi skipped a key meeting with then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken to attend the BRICS summit in Russia, further testing Washington's resolve. Meanwhile, Egypt has deepened ties with China, acquiring Chinese fighter jets and allowing anti-American, pro-Chinese Communist Party propaganda to seep into state institutions. Trump, who values loyalty, may see Cairo's obvious hedging as a betrayal.

Egypt, of course, is terrified of allowing refugees from the Muslim Brotherhood-run enclave onto its territory, and it did, as Schanzer and Wahba note, reportedly reject an offer of $250 billion from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in exchange for allowing Gazan refugees into the Sinai. But as Judith Miller reported for Tablet in May, Egypt was narrowly saved from economic disaster in 2024 by a combined $50 billion cash infusion from an International Monetary Fund loan, European Union grants and loans, and a massive real-estate development deal financed by the UAE—all secured thanks to pressure from the Biden administration, which decided, as the Egyptian analyst Ahmed Aboudouh put it to Miller, that Egypt was “too big to fail.”

Trump may or may not share that view, but the point is that he has considerable leverage over Cairo—to say nothing of Jordan, which is almost entirely dependent on the United States for its security. The Israelis, meanwhile, might want to consider listening to Trump rather than Steve Witkoff. Opportunities like this one don’t come along every day.

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The Rest

→File this one under “we told you so”:

Israel has complained to the U.S.-led committee overseeing the cease-fire in Lebanon that Iranian diplomats and others are delivering tens of millions of dollars in cash to Hezbollah to fund the group’s revival, a U.S. defense official speaking for the committee and people familiar with the content of the complaint said.

That’s from a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal, which says that, according to the Israeli complaint, Iranian envoys have been flying to Beirut with “suitcases stuffed with U.S. dollars” (the complaint alleges similar problems with Turkish citizens coming from Istanbul). But, as the article goes on to note, the committee “doesn’t adjudicate violations” and has instead “conveyed the complaints to Lebanon’s government”—which is controlled by Hezbollah.

→The military helicopter that fatally collided with a commercial jet in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday was “flying outside its approved flight path,” according to a report in The New York Times. Citing “four people briefed on the incident,” the Times reports that the helicopter was flying at least 100 feet over its approved maximum altitude of 200 feet and was and roughly a half-mile from its approved route on the far side of the Potomac River. While that sounds bad, a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal suggests that a collision like this was only a matter of time, given the long history of near-misses at Reagan National Airport (DCA):

“I cannot imagine what business is so pressing that these helicopters are allowed to cross the path of airliners carrying hundreds of people!” one pilot wrote in a 2013 report filed to the Aviation Safety Reporting System, or ASRS, after a near-collision with a helicopter. “What would normally be alarming at any other airport in the country has become commonplace at DCA.”

We noted in yesterday’s edition that the DCA control tower was understaffed at the time of the collision, with one controller handling what should have been two people’s jobs—directing helicopter traffic and directing airplane traffic. This was, according to the Times, because a manager allowed one employee to clock out early.

→Quote of the Day

I have no love for Assad or any dictator. I just hate al-Qaeda. I hate that our leaders cozy up to Islamist extremists, calling them ‘rebels’ as Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton: ‘Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.’ Syria is now controlled by al-Qaeda offshoot HTS [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham], led by an Islamist Jihadist who danced in the streets on 9/11, and many who were responsible for the killing of many American soldiers.

That’s from director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard’s opening statement at her Senate confirmation hearing yesterday. While we’re no fans of al-Qaeda ourselves, it’s worth noting that in declaring Syria a de facto terrorist state, Gabbard is striking a different tone from her boss’s. According to a Thursday report by Maariv, Trump has proposed a deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in which he would withdraw all U.S. military forces from Syria (a promise he made on the campaign trail) on the condition that Erdoğan restore Turkey’s diplomatic ties to Israel. Trump has previously praised HTS’s toppling of the Assad regime as Turkey’s “unfriendly takeover” of Syria, suggesting that he sees—correctly in our view—states, and especially allied states, as the proper focus of U.S. foreign policy.

Nevertheless, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, a hawk who was critical of Trump’s cease-fire deal, endorsed Gabbard’s nomination yesterday. Cotton praised Gabbard for her assessment that our intelligence agencies having grown bloated and overly bureaucratic, and his endorsement could be exactly what she needs to pass confirmation against Republican senators like Susan Collins and John Cornyn, who have expressed worry about Gabbard’s stance on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the intelligence community to collect intelligence from non-U.S. citizens outside the country. Gabbard sought to repeal Section 702 in 2020 but claimed at her hearing to have flipped her position, according to The Hill.

→While on the topic of Syria, it appears the country is getting its very own version of the Department of Government Efficiency as HTS, which now controls Syria after overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in December, is planning to fire a third of all public sector workers and privatize state-run companies that were prominent during the Assad regime, Reuters reports. HTS hopes to eliminate the bloat, waste, and corruption that was a trademark of Assad’s era. The layoffs, which began weeks after HTS assumed power, have triggered protests from government workers. Reuters interviewed five ministers in the interim formed by HTS who unanimously declared their intentions of “shrinking the state” and removing “ghost employees,” or people paid to do little or nothing during Assad’s rule. Transitional president Ahmed al-Sharaa plans to privatize all 107 state-run industrial companies, which the new Syrian economy minister, Basil Abdel Hanan, says are mostly loss making.

→Emily Damari, one of Hamas’ prisoners who was released Jan. 19, told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on a phone call that she had been held for some time in a U.N. facility belonging to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) but was not given access to medical facilities. Damari was kidnapped from her home on Oct. 7 by Hamas terrorists who shot her hand and leg and killed her dog, according to SkyNews. She was denied medical treatment and still, according to her mother in a post on X, has a long road to recovery. Israel banned UNRWA from its sovereign territory this week with the expressed support of the United States. Yet major European powers Germany, France, and Britain have all expressed concern about the UNRWA ban, according to Reuters. Perhaps Starmer’s conversation with Damari will move him on this issue, but given that there’s been mountainous evidence of UNRWA facilities being harborers of terror for well over a year, it’s not likely.

→Rahamim ‘Rami’ Shy, a 47-year-old former policy adviser to Barack Obama, has been sentenced to 11 and a half years of prison time in the United Kingdom for traveling across the pond to have sex with a nine-year-old girl. Shy traveled from New York to Bedford, England, in February of last year after a month of messaging and planning with who he thought was the young girl. The girl, “Debbie,” was an undercover officer. According to the BBC, he was found guilty of arranging the commission of a child sex offense, namely rape, and possessing indecent photographs of a child. When he was arrested in Bedford, officers found cuddly toys and condoms in his luggage, and a phone full of indecent images of children, as well as incriminating messages. Shy was born in New Jersey and worked as an investment banker before being hired by Obama to advise on issues related to counterterror in Afghanistan and Pakistan, specifically on the issue of terror financing. According to MSN, Shy also worked at the Treasury Department from 2008 to 2014 and served under Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. He also reportedly worked at Citibank after Obama’s second term, but a rep from the bank told MSN that he hadn’t worked there in some time.

→On the first episode of his new podcast “ArkanSanity,” UFC featherweight fighter Bryce Mitchell decided he would go viral by claiming that, based on “his own research,” Adolf Hitler was a “good guy” who “he’d like to go fishing with”—at least “before Hitler started taking meth.” When Mitchell’s poor co-host attempted to address Hitler’s murder of 6 million Jews, Mitchell responded with Holocaust denial and later sought to reassure his audience that he “had never killed a Jewish person”—which made it sound as if perhaps he had killed someone else. UFC President Dana White, who is in Saudi Arabia for a UFC event tomorrow night, instantly called a press conference to address Mitchell’s statements, saying it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard said by one of his stars—quite a statement, given the long history of stupid comments from UFC fighters—and that he was disgusted by it.

White, a free-speech absolutist, said he wouldn’t punish Mitchell for his statements. While he may not cut Mitchell from the roster outright, he may have other ways of getting back at him. Namely, fans have long suspected that White organizes unfavorable matchups for fighters he wants to punish. In 2022, for instance, White booked veteran fan-favorite welterweight Nate Diaz to fight the Chechen wrestling specialist Khamzat Chimaev. The fight was widely condemned by fans who believed White was “feeding” Diaz to Chimaev to get back at Diaz for asking for more money, knowing full well Diaz would get badly hurt in the match. On fight night, the Chechen mysteriously missed weight. Fans believed Chimaev was told to miss weight deliberately so White wouldn’t have to deal with the bad PR of having set up one of his most beloved stars to be severely hurt by a much younger, much more skilled fighter. White later admitted Chimaev “wouldn’t have been good” for Diaz, according to MMAJUNKIE.com.

Mitchell was among the UFC stars present at Trump’s inauguration party, where he was photographed praying with Irish MMA icon Conor McGregor. Mitchell appeared on Tucker Carlson Uncensored in early 2024 but has been vocally antagonistic toward Elon Musk (alongside the antisemitic remarks on the podcast, he also managed to throw jabs at Musk, who he believes wants to “control our thoughts.”) He and former UFC pro Jake Shields can be seen as the “Groyper wing” of MMA, whose antisemitic beliefs have gotten so extreme that they’ve ended up “pro-Muslim”; both fighters consider themselves pro-Palestinian activists.

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