Donald Trump’s grotesque vision of transforming Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is the instinct of a man who sees devastation as an opportunity., writes Gillian Schutte.
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Donald Trump’s grotesque vision of transforming Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is the instinct of a man who sees devastation as an opportunity.
That anyone could look upon genocide and see prime real estate is appalling. Yet the outrage from Western liberals has been equally revealing, if not hypocritical.
These are the same voices that endorsed, armed, and shielded Netanyahu's brutal assault on Gaza, treating Palestinian suffering as a mere geopolitical inconvenience. Now, confronted with Trump’s crude language, they recoil—not because he has lied, but because he has said aloud what they prefer to keep hidden.
The reaction from Western leaders and media is, in itself, a confession.
These are the governments that armed Israel, protected it from accountability, and turned a blind eye to the genociding of Palestinian people. Yet now, they perform moral outrage at the prospect of real estate speculation on the very ruins they helped create.
Their response is not about ethics but optics. Trump, intentionally or not, drags the unspoken logic of empire into the open, stripping away the diplomatic language that normally conceals Western hypocrisy. He does not mask plunder with empty rhetoric about “democracy” or “humanitarian aid.” He simply states what those in power believe: the world is for sale to the highest bidder.
This is why he is such a unique threat. Liberalism does not fear Trump because he opposes empire—it fears him because he refuses to engage in the rituals that make empire palatable.
His bluntness exposes the machinery of power that liberals prefer to dress in moral responsibility. He does not call military aggression “democracy promotion” or repackage corporate exploitation as “development aid.” He forces Western liberalism to confront itself—a reflection it would rather avoid.
Liberalism survives on the illusion that it is the rational, enlightened force guiding history. It presents itself as a stabilising power, spreading democracy, economic progress, and human rights.
Yet this same liberalism, through institutions like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has spent decades toppling governments, funding proxy wars, and dismantling movements that challenge Western hegemony.
These organisations have never been about democracy—they are instruments of control.
USAID operates as an economic enforcer, while NED continues the CIA’s legacy of regime change under the guise of “supporting democracy.”
The “freedom” they promote is nothing more than a tool to keep markets open to Western capital.
This is why Trump’s dismantling of these institutions provokes such outrage. It is not just liberals who panic—it is the entire global order that depends on them. Conservatives see them as wasteful globalist projects; the left sees them as neoliberal tools of domination. The Trotskyites, as ever, are caught between their revolutionary ideals and their dependence on the institutions they claim to oppose.
It is no surprise that attacks on liberal fascism come from both the right and the left. The right opposes it for its erosion of national sovereignty, its economic coercion, and its imposition of globalist policies that serve elite interests at the expense of local populations.
The left, meanwhile, understands that the liberal order’s claims to uphold democracy and human rights are merely a façade for war, resource extraction, and financial control. Both sides, for different reasons, have come to the realisation that liberal hegemony is neither democratic nor just—it is simply the ideological mask of empire.
Trump’s bluntness forces this realisation into the open. His refusal to dress up corporate pillage as humanitarian intervention lays bare the machinery of imperialism, making it impossible to ignore the reality that the unipolar world order is sustained not by diplomacy or moral authority, but by war, economic plunder, and manufactured consent.
His rhetoric, devoid of the usual diplomatic illusions, exposes the fact that empire is not about democracy—it is about control.
As these patronage networks collapse, the shockwaves reach beyond Washington. The decline of USAID and NED signals the erosion of the ideological machinery that has upheld liberal hegemony for decades.
Media outlets that relied on their funding—The Guardian, Daily Maverick, and countless Western think tanks—are now exposed as ideological enforcers of a failing empire. Their job has been to frame U.S. dominance as a moral crusade, to justify war and economic strangleholds. But what happens when the funding runs dry? When their credibility crumbles under the weight of their own contradictions?
The fractures are already visible. Liberal media, long accustomed to defining the boundaries of acceptable discourse, now faces attacks from all sides—criticised by the right for its globalist disdain for nationalism, and by the left for its complicity in imperialism. It is an ideology under siege.
Even Trump’s crude intervention in South Africa’s land expropriation debate exposed liberal contradictions.
His exaggerated warnings of “white genocide” were absurd, yet they inadvertently highlighted the ANC’s duplicity. Ramaphosa’s government presents itself as committed to land reform, but land ownership remains firmly in the hands of the monied elite.
There is no meaningful redistribution, no justice for the dispossessed—only legal manoeuvring, corporate deals, and empty rhetoric. Western liberals condemned Trump’s ignorance, yet they continue to fund ANC-aligned projects that protect the very white and elite landowners they claim to oppose.
The great irony is that Trump, in all his grotesque bluntness, may be the crude instrument needed to expose the illusions of liberal orthodoxy. His lack of tact and transactional view of power are not anomalies—they are symptoms of a world where the liberal narrative no longer holds.
The more he speaks, the more he forces the establishment to reveal its true nature. Their horror is not a reaction to lies he tells, but to truths he exposes.
For decades, liberal elites have wielded the language of democracy as a weapon, dismissing critics as fascists or extremists while themselves engaging in mass violence, economic coercion, and ideological suppression.
But what happens when that language loses its power? When the illusions crack and the reality of Western dominance is laid bare?
Trump’s rise is not an accident—it is the inevitable outcome of a system built on contradictions. His vulgarity and disregard for decorum are not the causes of his influence, but the consequences of a world that can no longer sustain its illusions.
The liberal order, in its desperate attempt to maintain its moral authority, has instead revealed itself as little more than a self-perpetuating lie.
Yet while Trump exposes the hypocrisies of liberal empire, he is no ally of the struggle against it. His own brand of plunder—his fixation on real estate, resources, and transactional geopolitics—is merely a cruder version of the same imperial logic. The scramble for gas, oil, and land will not end simply because he has laid it bare. If anything, his brazen opportunism accelerates the forces of global exploitation.
Stopping both Trump’s real estate empire and the Western war machine he inadvertently unmasks requires more than outrage—it demands dismantling the economic and military structures that uphold empire itself.
If Trump has given the struggle a clearer view of the enemy, it is now up to those who oppose imperialism—not just in rhetoric, but in action—to ensure that neither he nor the empire he exposes are allowed to prevail.
* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Follow Gillian on X - @GillianSchutte1 and on Facebook - Gillian Schutte.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.