CNN —
Trump administration officials are hurrying to catch up to the president’s audacious and improbable plan for the United States to take ownership of Gaza and redevelop it into a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” trying to wrap their heads around an idea that some hope might be so outlandish it forces other nations to step in with their own proposals for the Palestinian enclave.
Trump’s idea — announced Tuesday evening at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — was formulated over time, people familiar with the matter said, and appeared to originate with the president himself. It was only the latest reminder that policy ideas often start with Trump, rather than slowly build through national experts before ultimately reaching the Oval Office for discussion.
At its root, officials said, this suggestion was intended in part to spur action on an issue Trump viewed as moribund, with no other nations offering reasonable solutions for how to rebuild an area that has been obliterated by Israeli bombardment following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks.
However it came about, his unveiling of the idea — which he delivered by reading off notes in the East Room — came as a shock.
One adviser on Middle East issues had not heard the proposal until Trump raised it during his news conference. The official described themselves as stunned.
But others said Trump had run the idea by people in the days ahead of the Netanyahu talks. His Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who visited Gaza last week, returned to Washington with a dire impression of the devastation he witnessed, conveying to Trump and later to reporters a view that it was no longer habitable.
“It is the buildings that could tip over at any moment. There’s no utilities there whatsoever, no working water, electric, gas, nothing. God knows what kind of disease might be festering there,” Witkoff told reporters Tuesday. “So when the president talks about cleaning it out, he talks about making it habitable. And this is a long range plan.”
Witkoff’s descriptions left an impression on the president, who became preoccupied with the matter. In conversations with aides, he bemoaned what he said was a void of alternative plans being offered by other players in the region.
“The president has said he’s been socialing this idea for quite some time. He’s been thinking about this,” his press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday.
Still, she acknowledged the idea hadn’t been formalized into written form until Trump voiced it Tuesday.
“The plan was written in the president’s remarks last night as he revealed it to the world,” she said.
A White House official told CNN that Witkoff’s descriptions of his trip were an “inflection point” for the president.
Trump’s close Middle East advisers, like national security adviser Mike Waltz and Witkoff, knew Trump was planning to lay out the proposal on Tuesday, the official said. Waltz and Witkoff discussed the idea with Netanyahu Monday night while meeting with the Israeli leader at Blair House, the official said.
“The notion of lather, rinse, repeat — let’s do the same thing in Gaza we’ve done for decades isn’t going to sustain,” the White House official said of how Trump and his team got to this position. “We’ve been in this loop, this cycle … for too long and it isn’t working.”
Now, Trump’s Middle East brokers are prioritizing “continuing steps,” one source familiar with the strategy told CNN, primarily ensuring that the current ceasefire deal and hostage agreement holds and that all parties “keep their end of the bargain.”
Trump personally maintains he will be able to work out a long-term agreement with Jordan and Egypt to ultimately accept Gazans displaced by his proposed effort, despite those countries rejecting any plan to accept new Palestinian refugees, the White House official said.
That will be central to the discussion Trump has with Jordan’s King Abdullah when he visits the White House next week.
Like many regional leaders, the Jordanian king is now unexpectedly contending with a new dynamic to the deeply complex matter of what to do with Gaza.
The president’s comments took several Cabinet members in the East Room by surprise. As Republican leaders watched from Capitol Hill, they too were caught off guard by the remarks.
The proposal for Gaza has not come up in private meetings Trump has held with GOP members of the Armed Services Committees, aides said, even though the ceasefire and broader challenges across the Middle East were key points of discussion as late as last week.
“No,” a senior Republican aide told CNN. “Not a word of this was ever mentioned by the president.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was traveling in Guatemala, heard the idea for the first time as he watched Trump’s news conference with Netanyahu on television. The Middle East has been dramatically reduced from his portfolio, with Witkoff, the president’s longtime friend, serving as the US envoy to the region.
Rubio, who Trump said had been patched in by telephone to his meetings with the Israelis “listening to every single word that we say,” wrote on social media afterward: “The United States stands ready to lead and Make Gaza Beautiful Again. Our pursuit is one of lasting peace in the region for all people.”
It was less clear whether Netanyahu knew precisely what Trump intended to say, but the smile that grew across his face made clear that he liked what he heard.
Yet for all of the astonishment at Trump’s own words, when he often sounded more like a real estate developer than an American president, his ideas for Gaza steadily gathered steam as the day wore along as he welcomed Netanyahu to the White House. He read from a prepared text the sentence that caused a global double-take: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip.”
A day after Trump made his comments, Waltz suggested it had been in the works for some time.
“We’ve been looking at this over the last weeks and months, and frankly he’s been thinking about it since October 7,” Waltz said Wednesday on CBS.
“He’s not seeing any realistic solutions on how those miles and miles and miles of debris are going to be cleared,” Waltz went on to say. He added: “The fact that nobody has a realistic solution, and he puts some bold, fresh, new ideas on the table, I don’t think should be criticized in any way. I think it’s going to bring the entire region to come with their own solutions if they don’t like Mr. Trump’s solutions.”
In public and private conversations over the last year, Trump has repeatedly highlighted the value of Gaza’s seaside location, suggesting it was prime real estate for development.
His son-in-law Jared Kushner made a similar argument last year, calling Gaza’s waterfront “very valuable.” Kushner is not serving in Trump’s White House, as he did during his father-in-law’s first administration, but is nonetheless viewed as a sounding board on key issues, including in the Middle East.
Trump, speaking on Inauguration Day last month, offered hints at where his Gaza plan may be headed.
“It’s a phenomenal location, on the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things could be done with it,” Trump said shortly after being sworn in. He said then he “might” be willing to help with reconstruction.
That openness to help clearly evolved over the ensuing two weeks to the plan he unveiled Tuesday to take control of the strip — potentially with the help of US troops — and rebuild it into an “international, unbelievable place.”
Sending US troops to the region would be in stark contrast to Trump’s long-held critique of nation building and foreign entanglements. He was among the sharpest critics of Republican orthodoxy of national building during the George W. Bush administration.
“We are ending the era of endless wars. In its place is a renewed, clear-eyed focus on defending America’s vital interests,” Trump told West Point cadets in 2020. “It is not the duty of US troops to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have never even heard of.”
