‘Trump Gaza Number One’

On February 25, 2025, the president of the United States of America posted a video to his socials, an AI-created vision of a postwar Gaza. To enter this Trumpian utopia you first have to pass through a large hole, like the opening of a cave, or the entrance to a mine. On one side of the portal there is war, devastation, mass murder, orphaned children, destroyed homes. On the other, a beachfront resort of palm trees, bread bowls filled with hummus, Vegas-style hotels, and many golden idols of the great man himself. Dollar bills rain down democratically on ragged children and Elon Musk alike. Meanwhile, Donald and Bibi sip cocktails on a couple of sun loungers, in a modified landscape perfectly adapted to their needs and interests. Through it all a single plays:

Donald’s coming to set you free
Bringing the light for all to see
No more tunnels, no more fear
Trump Gaza is finally here.
Trump Gaza shining bright 
Golden future, a brand new light
Feast and dance, the deal is done
Trump Gaza number one.

It was only thirty-three seconds long, this “satirical” video, but it is one of the most comprehensive depictions of what I want to call the American Imaginary that I have ever seen. Within the American Imaginary, there is and always has been a subcategory of people in this world who are not only born to suffer but are habituated to it. They come from the “shithole countries,” as previously defined by the president, during his first term. This region has historically gone by different names. The “Third World.” “The Global South.” “Arabia.” (And it can be extended. It may soon include all of “Eastern Europe,” as President Zelensky is discovering.) In these places live the “wretched of the earth,” as defined by Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist-philosopher who, though he died in 1961, is one of the political thinkers most closely identified with our historical moment. 

Fanon diagnosed all of this, long ago. He understood that in the colonial imagination the wretched are a species apart, a special kind of desensitized people who do not mourn their dead as we do, and look upon their own poverty with the relative equanimity of those who can expect nothing better. Collectively, the wretched possess what Fanon called “crushing objecthood.” They are not sacred humans in and of themselves but rather elements of a stage set upon which the drama of Western power is played. We can’t know exactly what prompt the makers of Trump Gaza Number One fed into the machine, but they might have gotten much the same result if they had used Fanon’s analysis of the French attitude to Algeria:

The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French presence. A hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature is in fact synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitos, the natives, and disease. Colonization has succeeded once this untamed Nature has been brought under control. Cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing.

Before any bomb falls, or any real estate deal can be made, the shithole country has first to be reduced to a conceptual nonexistence, the instrumentalist backdrop to Western interests and pleasures. It makes perfect sense that the video should take the structural form of a tourist ad: for many Americans the wretched are only ever glimpsed IRL during a vacation. Gaza, in this vision, is the same place as Morocco, is the same place as “Arabia,” is the same phantasmagorical place in which Disney set Aladdin. Its defining features are: barefoot urchins, palm trees, and belly dancing. (Although in Trump Gaza Number One the vision is so relentlessly masculinist, even the dancing girls have beards.) That’s all you see while you’re on the resort, and you’ll never leave the resort—if you’re wise. In Trump’s world, this logic can be perfected: there will be only the resort. The other world, the wretched world, has been left on the flip side of the portal, through which gleeful orphaned children run, more than eager to forgive, forget, and frolic on a boulevard built atop the bones of their parents.

*

That AI should have rendered the portal so that it resembles the ragged mouth of a mine does not feel coincidental. AI itself is a portal technology, appearing as one thing when viewed from “our” side, and quite another by the populations of mineral-rich countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In America, AI is a copyright issue, an uncanny video, a propaganda tool. Through the portal, it is the destructive, extractive and violent contest to get sufficient cobalt and coltan out of African ground. 

Through that self-forgetting portal so much travels and is hidden. Not only the bloody consequences of the wars we fund and the wars we ignore, but also everything our society produces that we don’t want to deal with. Using this same portal, we freshly invade the many formerly colonized, shithole countries with all of our old car batteries, broken-up cruise ships, mountains of old clothes, continents of plastic bottles… That’s what a portal is for. To take you from one place to another, from one world to another, and to maintain the separation. 

The pressing job of the left right now is to expose this illusion. To insist that this is in fact one world we are living in, one in which universal regulatory measures capable of protecting all human life are still possible. To do this, we need transnational institutions which—however imperfect—persist through time, and can’t be unilaterally destroyed by the group of ideological gangsters presently occupying the White House. Their only concern is “disruption.” There are no universal values in their world, only American ones. In their Imaginary, the cure to the ills of this world is the complete submission of the weak to the strong, and the remaking of all countries in the image of their own. To counter that vision will require political, practical and legislative work but also a philosophical underpinning of at least equal strength to the gold-plated “America First” banality on proud display in Trump Gaza Number One. 

A general concept of the human does not exist for this White House. There are Americans and then there is everybody else. One world that lives parasitically on top of another. But they are aided and abetted in this fundamental deceit when we, on the left, can likewise find no language to insist upon the existence of a single human reality, populated by billions of sacred human beings, to whom some universal laws of protection might be applied. If Fanon is truly the man of the moment, at this point it is an indulgence to applaud a Fanonian call to violent resistance while simultaneously ignoring the equally strong case Fanon made for a radical humanism as the necessary basis of any progressive socialist politics. “What matters today,” Fanon claimed, “the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences might be.” Not us, not them: humanity.

Fanon’s incisive critique of colonial pretensions to universality has been essential. Still, he never despaired of the possibility of a just universe, one in which human beings are no longer treated as mere resources to be exploited. That kind of justice requires a defense of the human qua human. Without it, we are left with a void, a hole, a portal. One which Trumpism is more than happy to fill, aided and abetted by AI. But we can’t let machines do our human accounting for us, nor allow Trumpism to lead the whole of humanity into a binary, Manichean world of number ones versus human zeroes. Of those who matter and those who don’t.