UPDATE (Feb. 4, 2025, 8:35 p.m. E.T.): During a joint press conference Tuesday night with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump said: “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we’ll do a good job with it, too.”

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday and King Abdullah II of Jordan does the same on Feb. 11, one question keeps bubbling up to the surface: Can Donald Trump, the self-professed “peacemaker” who has eyed the coveted Nobel Peace Prize for many years, go where no U.S. president has gone before by striking a transformational, comprehensive peace deal in the Middle East?

Trump’s critics would answer with a big eye roll. And yet his pressuring of Netanyahuto sign onto the first stage of a three-phase ceasefire deal with Hamas — three more hostages were freed over the weekend in return for more than 100 Palestinian prisonersthe fourth round of prisoner exchanges since the deal took effect in mid-January — at least gives some credibility behind the ambition. Trump clearly has Middle East peace on his mind, and the Trump administration’s desire to expand the 2020 Abraham Accordswhich normalized relations between Israel and four Arab countries, is never far from its lips. As national security adviser Mike Waltz said before Trump even stepped foot into office for his second term, Israeli-Saudi normalization is a “huge priority” for the team.

Trump clearly has Middle East peace on his mind.

But Trump can kiss all of this goodbye if he intends to move forward with his ongoing calls to expel the Palestinian population from Gaza, an idea he referenced during his joint press conference with Netanyahu at the White House. While he didn’t specifically use the word “expel” in his remarks, his suggestion that Palestinians might want to think about packing up their things and going to another area while reconstruction commences has caused shock and trepidation across the Arab world. Trump even suggested that his plan was in the works, with various countries contacting him and pledging assistance. Whether or not that’s the case, Trump appears increasingly invested in making this relocation scheme a reality. “Gaza is a demolition site right now,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “You can’t live in Gaza right now.”

If this were just another one-off, rambling comment from Trump, perhaps it could be dismissed as a nothing-burger. But it isn’t. Trump has referenced this idea on earlier occasions, first on Jan, 28, when he name-dropped Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordanian King Abdullah for help in taking Gaza’s population in, and again on Jan. 31, when he was signing executive orders in the Oval Office. Asked by a reporter about Egypt and Jordan’s refusal to play along, Trump matter-of-factlystated that they didn’t have a choice: “They will do it. They will do it. They’re gonna do it, OK? We do a lot for them, and they’re gonna do it.”

Trump’s pretensions aside, Egypt and Jordan have their own reasons for not wanting to turn themselves into Trump’s enforcers. The most obvious, of course, is that such a proposition is extraordinarily unpopular in the Arab world. Countries throughout the Middle East disagree on a lot of things, but dislocating more than 2 million Palestinians from their homes in Gaza and opening the door to Israeli annexation of the coastal enclave — a fantasy ultranationalist Israeli ministers like Bezalel Smotrich surely dream about — certainly isn’t one of them. If there was any dispute about that, the Arab League put it to rest over the weekend, when it released a statementthat such plans “threaten the region’s stability, risk expanding the conflict, and undermine prospects for peace and coexistence among its peoples.”

Egypt and Jordan also have self-interested reasons for dismissing any Gazan relocation effort. Jordan, for one, is already hosting more than 2 million Palestinianswho are registered as refugees, making approximately half of the kingdom’s population of Palestinian origin. As a resource-poor country, Jordan doesn’t have the luxury of sustaining a new influx of new refugees and wouldn’t want to, even if Washington or its Gulf allies picked up the tab (the U.S. already provides Jordan with $1.45 billionin foreign aid every year). For Egyptian President Sisi, the issue is less about economics and more about security. This is the same guy, after all, who led a 2013 military coup against a democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood-led government (Hamas was established in 1987 as an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood), killed more than 800 peoplein the process and jailed tens of thousands more in an attempt to snuff out any resistance. If Sisi wasn’t willing to let Palestinians into Egypt when Israeli military operations in Gaza were at its height, he’s unlikely to do so when the guns have fallen silent (for the time being).

Encouraging or compelling Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza, even if it’s ostensibly to accelerate reconstruction, is liable to kill Trump’s diplomatic agenda in the Middle East.

Encouraging or compelling Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza, even if it’s ostensibly to accelerate reconstruction, is liable to kill Trump’s diplomatic agenda in the Middle East. At the top of the wish list is an Israeli-Saudi normalization accord, something his predecessor Joe Biden couldn’t finalize before his term ended, despite a year-and-a-half of talks with Israeli and Saudi officials. Such a deal would be a groundbreaking accomplishment for Washington in a region often associated with sunk costs, self-defeating policies and missed opportunities. And just as important for Trump, it would be an extremely impressive achievement he could rightfully brag about.

Yet none of it will happen if Palestinians are forced to leave their own lands. It would snuff out an expansion of the Abraham Accords before the Trump administration even got the ball rolling. Although the Saudi government may have been open to a normalization deal with Israel before the war in Gaza, it’s no longer content with token Israeli concessions on behalf of the Palestinians. The Saudis now want a concrete pathway toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman said in September, “The [Saudi] kingdom will not stop its tireless work towards the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. We affirm that the kingdom will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without that.” The Saudi foreign minister reiterated that position in Novemberand it’s about as clear as it can get: Normalization without a Palestinian state (or at least a tangible process that leads to one) is impossible.

Trump, therefore, needs to ask a fundamental question: What’s more important to him? Doing something all of his predecessors couldn’t do — shepherding formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the Arab world’s most important state — or catering to the whims of Israel’s ultranationalists by proposing a cockamamie scheme that equates to deporting more than 2 million Palestinians from their own homes? The first is difficult to achieve but still doable; the second would cause more problems than they’re worth by compromising Washington’s diplomatic relationships in the Middle East, pushing his dream deal further away, and even risking the collapse of a ceasefire deal in Gaza he helped usher into being. And in this scenario, Trump can forget about seeing his name in the annals of Nobel history.

Daniel R. DePetris

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed yet another executive order targeting the rights of transgender people in this country. This one bars federal funds from going to health care providers that provide gender-affirming care to trans people under age 19.

Because the order blocks 18-year-olds, legal U.S. adults, from accessing transition care, early speculation among some legal observers is that bumping up the age of restriction to 19 instead of limiting it to under-18s provides federal courts with a precedent that brings the administration closer to enacting a complete ban on all gender-affirming care, including for adults. Understandably, the executive order quickly spread further panic among trans people, who have faced action after action from the White House over the first two weeks of the new presidential term.

“It really feels like we took two steps forward and are now being dragged backwards. It’s kind of terrifying living day to day waiting to see what’s going to be stripped away next.”

Already as president, Trump has signed executive orders that have led to a ban on trans people serving in the U.S. militarya bathroom ban in federal government buildingsthe Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reserving the right to investigate any employers who allow trans employees to use bathrooms according to their gender identity, and the Education Department to investigate funding for any schools that accommodate trans students. The White House also ordered government staff to remove pronouns from their email signatures, and the State Department removed “TQI” from the standard LGBTQI or LGBTQI+ abbreviation on a number of resource pages, addressing only LGB users.

“It’s really … demoralizing,” Lyra, a 19-year-old trans woman from New York, told me. “I started estrogen when I was 18, and it was a large reason as to why I could continue my studies in college.”

Trump’s actions appear to be a blatant attempt to wholesale wipe out a highly marginalized minority by fiat. There will, of course, be legal challenges ahead, but with a firmly conservative Supreme Court in place for the foreseeable future, any court wins will likely be temporary at best.

For Lyra, who only just recently passed the 19-year-old threshold laid out in the medical order, the expansion into restrictions on young adult care for 18-year-olds is particularly concerning. “It shows that this isn’t just about ‘kids’ as they say, because so many are already waiting for that 18 [year old] barrier for informed consent,” she said. “They’re pushing the line here, and mixed with all the other EOs relating to trans people, it really feels like we took two steps forward and are now being dragged backwards. It’s kind of terrifying living day to day waiting to see what’s going to be stripped away next.”

Along with threatening funding cuts to facilities providing youth gender-affirming care, Trump’s order seeks to politically overturn the medical consensus undergirding the current protocol for providing gender-affirming care. It orders the Department of Health and Human Services to disregard the current World Professional Association for Transgender Health guidelineswhich have been formed over decades by the leading medical experts in transgender health care, and states the Trump administration will conduct its own review of the science behind gender-affirming care.

It’s a move similar to that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, when he appointed a political lackey to run the Florida Department of Health and produce a sham “review” of the evidence behind gender-affirming care, which a team of experts reviewed and stated was “thoroughly flawed and lacking scientific weight.”

We’ve seen politicians work to politically banish health care they disapprove of before. They did it with abortion care, they’re doing it now with birth controland they’re well on their way to overriding the many doctors, experts and caretakers who know best what trans kids need.

This is lifesaving, medically necessary care according to mainstream legitimate medical authority in the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatricsthe American Medical Associationthe American Psychological Associationthe Endocrine Societythe World Professional Association for Transgender Healththe American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologistsand many others.

Accessing gender-affirming care already saved Lyra’s life once.

Lyra’s parents disowned her when she started estrogen at age 18, she tells me, and she says without the care she currently receives, she fears she would be dead by now. Her care “was a large part of why I was able to claim financial independence,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d likely have been in a much worse state today even if I was still with [my parents]being made to watch my body mature another year. I’d likely have turned to do-it-yourself” — meaning ordering her own hormones from a black market website and guessing at her dosage — “instead. Access to testing and medical offices really helped, making sure I was safe and that my dosages were correct.”

The conservatives in power want us to disappear. They want to purge us from society. Existing is the best revenge.

Without elaborating further, Lyra said she has contingency plans for accessing her hormones should a full adult ban come down from the White House. It’s a calculation that hundreds of thousands of trans people are having to make right now.

I want to finish this piece by directly addressing the trans people reading this. I know these are dark, hard times. We have so little information right now, and we don’t know what else is coming down the pike. But our community has been here before. There might not have been a total ban on our care, but there was a time not long ago when only the wealthiest among us could access legitimate health care.

We persisted then and we can persist now. Look after your trans friends, check in on them. Reach out to others if you need help. Find a reason to keep going.

“A lot of the reason I made it through my youth was in spite of my family, and I think some part of that continues on here,” Lyra said. “I’m motivated to keep going in spite of the bans and hate.”

The conservatives in power want us to disappear. They want to purge us from society. Existing is the best revenge.

If you consider the potential impacts of blocking people from receiving vital, lifesaving care, the message feels painfully clear: “[Trump] wants us dead,” Lyra said — “so I’m not doing it.” We have to live, if only to prove to those who are trying to erase us today that they are wrong.

Katelyn Burns

Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. She was the first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history.