The Masterplan and the Board of Peace

As Trump’s regime deteriorates into mayhem and his health falters, the vision presented at Davos by Jared Kushner is a mixture of Disaster Capitalism and colonialism. 

At the end of another extraordinary week, Jared Kushner, who holds no official position whatsoever, presented a “master plan” for redeveloping Gaza into a high-tech metropolis during a speech at the Board of Peace charter signing ceremony in Davos, Switzerland, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

The vision is pure and dystopian, blending high-tech with property development on top of a charnel house. It is the future as mapped out by Trump and his family surrounded by the global protection racket they are calling the Board of Peace.

As Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a writer for The Nation and a fellow of the Palestinian Policy Network said:

“In case you’re distracted by the shiny buildings in Kushner’s vision for Gaza, their plan is keep Palestinians in hyper-surveilled prison camps where they’ll eventually provide cheap labor for the resorts/high rises they won’t be allowed to live in, all built atop a mass grave.”

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner said the administration has moved from securing a ceasefire (which doesn’t exist) to what he described as the far harder task of implementing peace, framing the effort as a “shift in mindset” after years of war in Israel and decades of despair in Gaza.

Kushner said the next phase would centre on “security and demilitarisation”, arguing that no reconstruction or investment is possible without it. Though he had nothing to say about demilitarising the Israelis’ armed by, er, his father-in-law. He said the United States is working with Israel and a new technocratic Palestinian governing committee to “work with Hamas on demilitarisation,” describing security as the foundation for rebuilding Gaza’s economy and ending what he called long-term dependence on aid. Though of course he had nothing to say about the historical, moral or political context in which aid was required (and withheld).

He said the administration wants to replace Gaza’s aid-driven economy with what he described as a free-market model, saying that roughly 85 per cent of Gaza’s GDP has come from aid for years. Kushner said the goal is to bring the same economic mindset Trump promotes in the United States to Gaza, arguing that dignity and stability require jobs, investment, and long-term growth and not just humanitarian assistance.

The Master Plan

Re-framing the problems of Palestine as indolence and dependency on aid is a masterstroke of ideology, neatly bypassing the responsibility for the carnage from Israel and their supporters in the West. This is Orwell’s ‘Memory Hole’ built into the fabric of property development and structured colonialism, the final coffin for a besieged people: obliteration as development; death as growth; genocide as opportunity.

In Davos, Trump’s son-in-law Kushner outlined a master plan for rebuilding Gaza that included major infrastructure projects such as a seaport and an airport, saying there is “no plan B.” Reconstruction, he said, would begin in Rafah and move northward in phases toward Gaza City.

While the plans for an airport are welcomed by some, it’s worth remembering that Gaza had its own airport, Yasser Arafat International Airport, opened in 1998. Israel repeatedly bombed it in 2001 and 2002, destroying the runway, control tower, and radar. 

The plan is, like the hastily assembled ‘Board of Peace’ a monstrosity, a moral void ushered forward by a mob of gangsters, a dynastic stain on humanity. Kushner himself is a private citizen. He holds no office, he has no mandate, and no accountability. The ‘masterplan’ is the apogee of late capitalist thinking, in which power and capital operate shorn of any pretence of democracy, and history, culture and justice are meaningless in the face of power and violence. The plans for tourism are being rushed through not just ahead of or instead of justice, reconciliation and prosecution but in order to prevent justice, reconciliation and prosecution. In a grotesque move, it’s clear that they are removing rubble to start construction of the New Gaza Master Plan, and are doing so in the name of ‘peace’. They’re removing bodies and evidence of war crimes to make UN and ICC inspections redundant. And who can oppose this, and in doing oppose peace itself, progress and ‘development’?

Apart from the moral failure of displaying such plans at a time when a people are suffering an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, for which the keynote speakers are responsible, the plans belie the reality of cultural obliteration. The shiny skyscrapers will be built on top of the graves of thousands of men, women and children but they will also be built on the wreckage of mosques, temples, churches and holy sites, on top of the rubble of people’s homes, libraries, bookshops and hospitals. They will build on top of a cultural obliteration that is a key part of any genocidal campaign.

Of course, some members of the ‘Board of Peace’ couldn’t attend the launch. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu skipped the signing of US President Donald Trump’s board in Davos after Switzerland confirmed it would enforce the ICC arrest warrant over war crimes in Gaza.

Trump’s board includes such luminaries as Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of genocide; Alexander Lukashenko (President of Belarus); Mohammed bin Salman (Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia); Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (President of Egypt); Viktor Orbán (Prime Minister of Hungary); Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (President of Turkey); Mohammed bin Zayed — President of the United Arab Emirates); Shavkat Mirziyoyev (President of Uzbekistan); Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (Emir of Qatar); and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev (President of Kazakhstan). Vladimir Putin’s invite has, up until now, received no reply. No doubt he is weighing up the benefits of membership of such a dishonourable gang, with reports that Trump will unlock Russia’s frozen assets to be used as the $1 billion membership fee. 

This is what’s left of America’s global standing after one year of Trump, after a week when the world looked on in horror at Trump’s performance at Davos. European leaders were stunned by the regime’s intervention at Davos.

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde reportedly walked out of a high-profile dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos after a speech by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, which was heavily critical of Europe, sparked heckling and lead to the event being cut short.

During his January 20 speech at the World Economic Forum, French President Macron wore Henry Jullien sunglasses to cover a harmless bloodshot right eye, creating a memetic moment which amplified his push for European unity against Donald Trump’s tariff threats and Greenland rhetoric toward Denmark and EU nations. But if Macron, Carney, and even less credibly Starmer are being credited with curtailling or controlling Trump’s most threatening behaviour, it is hard to take such claims seriously.

Despite Trump’s late renunciation of the use of force, it seems that his tactic of issuing threats has worked (again). The President says the deal he claims to have reached on Greenland will give the US “total” and indefinite access to the Danish territory.

Speaking to reporters on his way back from Davos, Trump said the deal would be “much more generous to the United States, so much more generous”, while skirting questions on the territory’s sovereignty. Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen welcomed Trump’s decision earlier this week to rule out military action but said “I don’t know what there is in the agreement, or the deal, about my country.”

The deal – heralded by some as evidence of pushback from European leaders – is something we know very little about, and seems to have been brokered between Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte and Trump. That is unprecedented and nothing to be celebrated. It bypasses both the US Congress and the people of Greenland and Denmark. That’s no victory. As if to clarify for the prematurely jubilant Trump said: “This enormous unsecured island is actually part of North America. That’s our territory.”

In many ways, rather than act as a bulwark against American fascism, Europe’s elites and global bodies have smoothed its path. As the Guardian has it, describing Trump’s Board of Peace: “The body was birthed in subterfuge: the UN security council authorised a board of peace chaired by Mr Trump to oversee administration and reconstruction in Gaza. Despite misgivings about the colonialist model and free rein given to the US president, the vagueness of the resolution and desire to ensure his buy-in to a ceasefire won its passage. What the US has created is something entirely different. The board’s charter does not mention Gaza once. A man increasingly fixated on landgrabs now heads an “international peace-building body” to replace “failed” institutions. To what extent this is a serious attempt to encroach upon, if not supplant, the UN, versus a symbolic declaration of power and creation of another forum for polishing his ego, is unclear. Mr Trump appears to have overplayed his hand again. His claim that Vladimir Putin had joined (Mr Putin disagreed) made it easier for the UK and others to back away from an offer they were not supposed to refuse.”

This seems like small change. In a world of shifting-baseline syndrome and in which the Overton Window of what is acceptable, understandable moral and political behaviour is rapidly shifting to the right, we are being conned. The Jared Kushner plan for Gaza is supposed to be a good thing, because it is not as extreme as the outright annihilation wanted by the far-right in the Knesset. Trump deciding not to invade Greenland is framed as a victory, even though the payoff was a murky carve-up with the Nato chief. Starmer’s craven capitulation is dressed-up as a diplomatic masterstroke, despite him being routinely humiliated by the President of America. These are not victories, these are hard truths.
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Revelations at Davos

Fizzle Lick Zam

Perhaps it is not Trump’s general ignorance, his warped narcissism, or his macho posturing, that troubles some people, all of this is completely normalised. It is, instead his cognitive and physical decline. Tom Nichols, a writer at The Atlantic spoke for many when he said: “No one can be watching this Davos speech and reach any conclusion but that the President of the United States is mentally disturbed and that something is deeply wrong with him. This is both embarrassing and extremely dangerous.”

It’s true that Trump’s dementia is now manifesting itself as phonemic paraphasia in which words are fused or replaced by non-words. This is normally seen in those suffering from Alzheimer’s. In Trump’s case you then get – amid the stories of windmills and sharks and Hannibal Lecter – word-combinations like Christmas becoming “crissus” or a physical exam becoming “fizzle lick zam”.

His physical demeanour is also worrying, from his weight to his bizarre pallor to his shuffling gait to his bruised hands. Trump “hit his hand on the corner of the signing table,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to the media, about the large bruises on both hands. Leavitt explained that the bruising was due to the president meeting “more Americans and shak[ing] their hands on a daily basis than any other president in history.”

“And so it goes”, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.
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Memories of Creedmore

But there’s another element to Trump’s cognitive decline and visible physical deterioration that people are beginning to notice. Increasingly, Trump’s world is closing in on him, with the same stories, the same anecdotes being repeated like mantras rather than speeches.

Trump’s speeches have always been about him, and have often been a series of unfiltered ramblings from whatever is in his mind at the time, as if we have mistakenly made Homer Simpson the most powerful man in the world. But while Trump’s speeches are always all about himself, they are increasingly about his childhood.

At one stage during a recent lengthy monologue, Trump began reminiscing about his childhood, during which he would play baseball in Cunningham Park in New York. He said:

“You know, we used to have — when I was growing up, we had in my area in Queens — I grew up in Queens. We had a place called Creedmoor. Creedmoor. Did anybody know that? Creedmoor. It was a big — I said, “Mom, why are those bars on the building?” I used to play Little League baseball there, at a place called Cunningham Park. I was quite the baseball player, you wouldn’t believe. But I said to my mother, “Mom,” she would be there — always there for me. She said, “Son, you could be a professional baseball player.” I said, “Thanks, Mom.” I said, “Why are those bars on the windows?” Big building. Big, powerful building. It loomed over the park, actually.

She said, “Well, people that are very sick are in that building.” I said, “Boy.” I used to always look at that building, and I’d see this big building, big, tall building. It loomed over the park. It was sort of — now that I think of it, it was a pretty unfriendly sight. But I’ll never forget — I don’t know if it’s still there. Because they got rid of — most of them, you know, they — the Democrats in New York, they took them down, and the people live on the streets now.”

“That’s why you have a lot of the people in California and other places, they live in the streets. They took the mental institutions down. They’re expensive. But I’d say, “Why does that building have those bars?” Boy. It wasn’t normal. You know, you’re used to looking at, like, a window. But this one, you’re looking at all this steel, vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place. Nobody was getting out. It’s called the mental institution. That was an insane asylum.”

Setting aside the obsession with “mental asylums” that is a well-worn trope, and the litany of lies and nonsense in this speech, it’s the hyper-nostalgia that stands out. Trump can best be understood as an errant child desperately seeking approval.

If it is chastening, if not humiliating to witness the reality that the most powerful man in the world is so pitifully ignorant, it is worth removing ourselves from focusing entirely on him as an individual.
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Swan Lake

There are, after all, significant institutional and structural shifts at play here that are operating above and beyond Trump’s psycho-circus.

This week saw revelations from Nature magazine about the regime’s undermining of scientific research (US Science after a year of Trump). The authors identified: “More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.”

They concluded: “These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.”

This is the systemic withdrawal of commitment to scientific research that is inconvenient to the ideology of Trump’s wider regime. This has nothing to do with him.

Or take, for example the defunding of USAID, or the withdrawal from all climate negotiations and treaties, or, also this week the withdrawal from the World Health Organisation.  Or, indeed the plans laid out in the National Security Strategy: “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

Trump almost certainly had little to do with that.

Or take the pathetic dismantling of information boards at Independence National Historical Park’s President’s House in Philadelphia, where workers were seen dismantling information boards pertaining to the people George Washington enslaved. They were being removed after Trump’s administration ordered reviews of content deemed to “disparage” America. Much of this ideology is outsourced to – or generated by – Trump’s wider regime. These are systemic ideological changes that will live on beyond Trump’s lifetime, and many of which have nothing to do with the President.

Increasingly, Trump is just a meme-generator, ad-libbing lines about “They’re eating the swans” or “Let’s invade Greenland” or other racist tropes of degenerating imbecility while other people run the country quietly in the background.

Trump’s regime looks more and more reminiscent of the “Gerontocracy on the Balcony” (1980–1985) and Late USA looks more and more reminiscent of the end days of the USSR. In the Soviet Union’s last years figures like Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko appeared as frail figures, often supported by aides during parades on the balcony of Lenin’s Mausoleum.

President of the presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet Nikolai Podgorny, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Kosygin at the celebration of the Great October revolution anniversary, Moscow, 07Nov1973

Their public appearances were carefully managed to convey stability and Soviet might, yet often highlighted their failing health and instead they became symbols of the collapsing system around them. During the rapid succession of their deaths (Brezhnev in 1982, Andropov in 1984, Chernenko in 1985), Russian television frequently played the ballet Swan Lake on a loop to distract the public and mask political instability.

For Swan Lake replace Trump’s Truth Social and Musk’s X disinformation. Instead of soothing classical ballet we now have the balm of apocalyptic language and the surround-sound of fear. We must resist the purging of history and the dismantling of scientific research. We must reject what Henry A Giroux has called: “These narratives of decline, fear, insecurity, anxiety and visions of imminent danger, often expressed in the language of invasion, dangerous hordes, criminal and disease-infected others.”

Trump’s new world order and Kushner’s ‘Masterplan’ are simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous. They reek of power and threat and swagger but are held together by an old man who is falling apart. Trump’s regime, like the Master Plan is a fantasy, a delirium from which people are waking up and coming round. It’s a paradox that an administration that projects so much power is so inherently unstable and so resolutely committed to destroying itself. One positive from such a horrific era is that Britons are being given a prelude to what a Farage regime would look and feel like. The daily horrors of mass removals to detention centres are precisely what Reform UK promises for the streets of Britain. The world must look at the USA and decide a different path, but that is looking increasingly untenable with the very same political leaders and cultures that brought us to this calamitous moment.