Middle East: Status Quo Ends. USAID Panic. EO on Guys in Women’s Sports & More
When is a presser truly historic in nature?
When President Donald Trump, flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announces that the United States will take over the Gaza Strip. The London Spectator:
Some moments in history demand recognition, not just for their weight in the present but for the seismic shifts they herald. The Trump-Netanyahu press conference was one such moment – not a perfunctory diplomatic exercise, nor a routine reaffirmation of alliance, but an unambiguous declaration of intent. It was a disruption of long-entrenched, failed orthodoxies and the unveiling of a vision that dares to reimagine the Middle East in starkly different terms. …
Trump’s vision will terrify those who have grown comfortable with the status quo. It will unsettle those who prefer diplomatic inertia to hard truths. …
Right on cue, the New York Times is terrified “With Gaza Plan, an Unbound Trump Pushes an Improbable Idea“). PJ Media’s Robert Spencer is not terrified. In a post headlined “Trump Refuses to Repeat Failed Policies, Says U.S. Will ‘Own’ Gaza,” Spencer writes:
We are living at a truly momentous time in history. Donald Trump illustrated that yet again on Tuesday evening during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “You have to learn from history,” Trump declared and proceeded to upend the political order that has prevailed in the Middle East for decades. It is a multiply failed order and new approaches are very, very long overdue, but no one has dared to question it and suggest new solutions. Until now.
The most momentous announcement of this most momentous of press conferences was Trump’s declaration that Hamas would not be permitted to regain control of Gaza and that, in fact, the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip… we will own it.” He also reiterated his insistence that 1.7 million Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, explaining several times that this was necessary because the failed policies of the past should not and must not be applied yet again.
Hamas, Trump said, had ruled Gaza for years and offered no options for the Palestinian people beyond bloodshed and death. He sketched out a vision of a restored Gaza that would be an international area, populated not just by Palestinian Arabs but by people from all over the world who would be able to enjoy its renaissance as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Saudi Arabia is not on board, at present resisting any attempt to displace Palestinians and demanding a Palestinian state. President Trump’s Middle East envoy explains the plan.
Meanwhile, Pam Bondi has been confirmed as Attorney General and starts work today. Senator John Fetterman is the only Democrat to vote for Bondi. Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard has won the endorsement of liberal Republican Senator Susan Collins and with help from Senators Tom Cotton and Krysten Sinema just might make it. GOP Senator William Cassidy has yet to decide about HHS nominee RFJ Jr. For Pete’s Sake?: Meanwhile, military recruitment has picked up significantly since Trump was inaugurated.
The aforementioned PJ Media has a great headline this morning over Stephen Kruiser’s daily offering: “Come for the Freedom, Stay for the Democrats’ Exploding Heads.” One of the heads that exploded belongs to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said that the Trump tariffs will hit us in the guacamole. Comedian Jon Stewart made guacamole toast out of this:
Stewart also cracked of the 74-year-old lawmaker, “And Chuck, before you go out there, you look too young. Put on these readers and lower them on your nose.”
“Honestly, listening to Chuck Schumer speak on almost any topic,” Stewart told his audience, “makes me want to bomb Canada.”
Many heads are exploding over USAID. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal is headlined “Hurricane Musk and the USAID Panic”:
Mr. Musk sometimes blows hot air, and he needs to be watched to stay within legal guardrails. But he’s also hitting targets that have long deserved scrutiny and reform, which helps explain the wailing over the U.S. Agency for International Development.
No doubt spending $40 billion is bound to do some good somewhere. One oft-cited example is the Pepfar program that has funded anti-AIDS efforts in Africa in particular. But USAID, like most foreign aid, has become something of a plaster saint in Washington even if it does far less good than advertised. …
USAID is hardly full of Mother Teresas who only want to do good without a political agenda. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast cites examples of USAID’s progressive agenda at work.
John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist explains why it is important to shut down USAID.
Will President Trump—chief head exploder—cause a few more heads to explode today when he signs an executive order banning men who identify as “transgender” women from participating in women’s sports?
The order will establish sweeping mandates on sex and sports policy and will direct federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, to interpret federal Title IX rules as prohibiting the participation of transgender girls and women in female sports categories, according to a White House document on the upcoming executive order obtained by ABC News.
“Transgender girls and women” are—I probably don’t need to tell you, Dear Independent Reader—men and boys who identify as “trans” women. I couldn’t help noticing this same confusion in a Politico News Alert:
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from moving transgender women prisoners into men’s facilities or taking away their medical care.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, ruled Tuesday night that the policy — which Trump laid out in an executive order on his first day back in office — would likely violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
What Judge Lambert has done is to block male prisoners from being placed in facilities for men, where they likely were before they suddenly discovered they had been born in the wrong body. The EO on women’s sports will be signed today at 3 pm in the East Room, with the whole world watching. The Wall Street Journal has the story:
Trump will sign an order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” Wednesday afternoon, said people familiar with the matter, including a White House official and a member of Congress. …
The scope of the order stands to instantly affect any educational institution that receives federal funding—which includes almost every college in the U.S., as well as the majority of K-12 schools. The Title IX provision in the Education Amendments Act of 1972 prohibits sex-based discrimination in educational activities, though the meaning of that has been hotly contested for decades, mostly recently focusing on its application to transgender students.
In the face of such an order likely affecting all but a handful of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s 1,100 member schools, the NCAA has indicated that it will move rapidly to change its rules.
City Journal has two Must Reads this morning:
Steven Malanga writes about how the Catholic Church, which became a champion of the Biden open borders policy:
The Catholic Church has long positioned itself as an advocate for poor immigrants and provided them with services in the United States. But for decades, including during the great migration waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the church’s work was charitable in nature, funded by contributions from parishioners. Over the past 50 years or so, however, Catholic Church-affiliated organizations, especially Catholic Charities, have become government contractors with a stake in a growing welfare state. Even before the last four years of explosive immigration, Catholic Charities nationwide derived more than six of every ten dollars of revenues from government contracts. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities have been among the biggest beneficiaries.
Vice President Vance, a Catholic, and who is quoted in the piece, has pertinent things to say. With Vance, we may be on the brink of a serious discussion of the moral ramifications of these issues, which so far has eluded us.
In the wake of the devastating Reagan Airport crash, John Tierney explains why America’s air traffic control system is “an international disgrace.”
