Donald Trump’s latest plan to effectively “take over the Gaza strip” is seemingly too extreme for his Republican colleagues—though their tepid responses still leave wiggle room for Trump to push forward with the idea.
In a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, the president claimed that the U.S. would push Palestinians out of their home and “own it and be responsible.” That spontaneous and brazen idea caught most of his conservative colleagues—both in Congress and the media—off guard, as they grappled with whether Americans could be convinced to send their loved ones overseas to ethnically cleanse a war-torn region.
“We’ll see what our Arab friends say about that,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told Politico. “I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza. I think that might be problematic, but I’ll keep an open mind.”
Graham added that he imagined Gaza would be a “tough place to be stationed as an American.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told the outlet that how to achieve peace in the Middle East is still “a subject of conversation,” though he added that it sounds like Trump has “got an idea on that.”
Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley said, “I don’t know that I think it’s the best use of United States resources to spend a bunch of money in Gaza, I think maybe I’d prefer that to be spent in the United States first. But let’s see what happens.”
Another Republican senator, granted anonymity to candidly react to Trump’s invasion, said that they “did not have this” on their “bingo card.”
Even Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy sounded skeptical of the plan, optimistically saying Wednesday morning that Trump “knows the United States can’t invade another country.”
The definition of ethnic cleansing is the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society, per the Oxford English Dictionary. Ethnic cleansing has not been identified as an independent crime under international law, according to the United Nations.
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