Trump might want to revive America’s imperial heyday – but does his base?

Donald Trump’s proposal that the US take ownership of the Gaza Strip, expel and resettle the people there, and turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” has outraged Palestinians, shocked the international community and even confused many of his own conservative voters.

Yet the announcement seems like yet another sign that the president, while sometimes distancing himself from the neoconservative foreign policies that entangled the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, is willing to pursue – or at least entertain pursuing – an undisguised US imperialism that has more in common with the expansionism of Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson, the 19th and early-20th century presidents associated with some of American’s most brazen and violent conquests.

“Trump seems to have a scorn for the subtler forms of power projection that post-1945 US presidents have used, and seems to be very interested in naked displays of force or economic might,” Daniel Immerwahr, a history professor at Northwestern and the author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, said.

Trump’s proposal – which administration officials attempted to walk back on Wednesday – comes on the heels of a tumultuous couple of weeks in which he also demanded that Denmark sell Greenland to the US, threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, started abortive tariff wars with Mexico and Canada, and suggested that Canada should become “our 51st state”.

As is common with Trump, commentators have often been unsure whether to interpret his saber-rattling as serious policy proposals, trolling, attempts to stake out outrageous negotiating positions that he will then walk back, or undisciplined off-the-wall musings.

But with Gaza in ruins after 16 months of Israeli bombardment, and Benjamin Netanyahu – who was recently charged with war crimes by the international criminal court – present for the announcement, Trump’s Gaza proposal seems gravely serious.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump talk with reporters in the Oval Office in Washington DC, on Tuesday. Photograph: Shawn Thew/UPI/REX/Shutterstock

Members of the Israeli right have talked about cleansing Gaza of Palestinians for years, said Peter Beinart, the author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. “And now Trump … is taking this idea from the Israeli right but adding his own strange and ugly return to the kind of naked imperialism of the 19th and early 20th century, when the United States was in a business of basically seizing territories.”

Palestinians in Gaza are vehemently opposed to leaving. Displacing them against their will would violate international laws and could constitute a war crime. It would also require neighboring Arab and Muslim states to accept millions of new Palestinian refugees, an idea they immediately and sharply rejected.

During his press conference, Trump said that the US “will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too”.

He went on: “I do see a long-term ownership position and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East and maybe the entire Middle East,” adding: “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.”

The idea seemed to echo comments from March last year, when Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, said: “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.”

“It’s infuriating to listen to President Trump talk about the removal of Palestinians from Palestine and the ownership over their land, the acquisition of their territory by force, as if it was a business transaction and not a violation of very core principles of international law,” said Noura Erakat, a Palestinian American human rights attorney and professor at Rutgers.

Trump’s expansionist designs would seem to flout the America First isolationism that much of his base supports. But Immerwahr noted that Trump has never really been strictly isolationist.

Immerwahr added that he doubted many of Trump’s voters support these kinds of aggressive foreign policy moves, even when they concern what Trump might call the US’s backyard: “Even with Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal Zone, it is just far from clear to me how much autonomous support there has been from the Maga base.”

While the Israeli right has been thrilled about Trump’s proposal, US conservatives seemed divided or unsure of how to react – perhaps reflective of wider ideological splits between traditional Republican hawks and Republican voters tired of US adventurism overseas. Some Republican members of Congress refused to rule out the idea, while Senator Rand Paul wrote online: “The pursuit for peace should be that of the Israelis and the Palestinians. I thought we voted for America First.”

Occupying Gaza “sounds like a terrible idea for a number of reasons”, someone wrote more plainly on a conservative forum on Reddit, “chiefly that it has zero value and [sounds like] a huge expense and I want my money in my pocket, not in the Middle East”.

Immerwahr thinks that Trump is attracted to territories he believes are blank slates or can be folded into a larger white America. During his first term, Trump mused about the US divesting of Puerto Rico or trading it for Greenland.

“If you were to ask what links the Panama Canal Zone, Canada, Greenland, and a Gaza that has been emptied of Palestinians and rendered into a ‘Riviera’, I think you could say that in Trump’s fantasies these places are all symbolically white, or could be symbolically white … either because the Indigenous population seems sparse and there seems to be a lot of land for settlement or other kind of infrastructure projects, or because, in the case of the Panama Canal, that is historically a zone that was controlled by the United States and dominated by [white Americans].”

Meanwhile, some elements of the so-called new right, a formerly fringe conservative intellectual movement with ties to Silicon Valley, have praised Trump’s expansionist tendencies. A recent Politico piece noted that some new right theorists believe that buying Greenland would revitalize the US “frontier spirit” that they believe spiritually fueled the US in previous centuries.

“In terms of Trump’s bluster, Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson are the obvious parallels who kind of delight in the capabilities that come with US military might,” Immerwahr said. A better parallel might be the 19th century, however, when the US continually seized territory, but focused its colonialism on areas where white settlement seemed viable.

Until as late as the 1950s, “the logic is that white settlement is the magic dust that would be sprinkled on a territory that would make it eligible for inclusion in the union.”

Beinart feels that Trump’s indifference to precedents and norms, combined with a “complete lack of any moral compass”, mean that he doesn’t even see any problems with the idea of rebuilding Gaza as a US colony.

“It just doesn’t occur to him that there’s something monstrous about the idea of sending US weapons to utterly destroy a territory,” Beinart said, “and then saying: ‘Oh gosh, it looks like it really sucks there now, people should have to leave.’”