Why Is Trump Making Excuses for Hamas?
Until recently, open support for Hamas in the United States was confined to the far left. The national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which circulated talking points supporting the October 7 attacks, has lately declared on Instagram “DEATH TO COLLABORATORS.” But the notorious terrorist organization has found a new defender: President Donald Trump.
On Sunday evening, a reporter asked the president about reports that Hamas is reestablishing its authority in the Gaza Strip by executing its rivals. Trump said that the group is merely cracking down on crime, for which it has American approval.
“They do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he said. “We are having ’em watch that there’s not going to be big crime or some of the problems that you have when you have areas like this that have been literally demolished.”
[Read: How Trump pushed Israel and Hamas to yes]
Yesterday, talking with reporters in the White House, Trump added more detail to his defense of Hamas. “They did take out a couple of gangs that were very bad—very, very bad gangs,” he said. “And they did take ’em out. And they killed a number of gang members. And that didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you. That’s okay. A couple of very bad gangs.”
Why is Trump praising one of the world’s most violent and fanatical terrorist organizations as crime-fighting guardians of public order? Two motives spring to mind.
First, Trump is invested in his cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. The terms of the pact are shaky, though. Hamas has agreed to release the bodies of its remaining Israeli hostages, but the group is reluctant to heed demands that it give up power. Its frantic campaign of murder and intimidation against alleged gangsters and gangs—who are mostly anti-Hamas armed groups and dissidents, some with ties to Israel—seems designed to foreclose the political transformation the deal calls for. Admitting that this violence poses a dire threat to the prospect of peace in the region would challenge Trump’s claim to have brought about a historic truce. And so he is reflexively brushing off any news that seems to undermine his own achievement.
A second, more disturbing explanation is that Trump genuinely does not distinguish between crime-fighting and authoritarian crackdowns. He has praised authoritarian governments elsewhere for using force to suppress protests. In 1990, he told Playboy that China had mistakenly allowed some protests before wisely reversing course: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
Trump has long praised autocrats who suppress dissent, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. At a press event on Monday, he praised the dictatorship of Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for its supposed tough-on-crime stance: “It’s about leadership, and it’s really nice when you say, ‘How is your crime situation?,’ and they don’t even know what you’re talking about. ‘What do you mean crime? We don’t have crime.’ Because if he has crime, he puts it out very quickly.” Rather than recoil at the sight of masked goons carrying out street justice without due process, Trump seems similarly inclined to praise Hamas for being tough on crime.
[Graeme Wood: One era ends in Gaza, and another begins]
The suggestion that Trump sees Hamas’s tactics as admirable may sound uncharitable, but Trump himself likened Hamas’s approach to his own. Elaborating on his defense of Hamas yesterday, Trump said, “You know, it’s no different than other countries. Like, Venezuela sent their gangs into us, and we took care of those gangs. We have Washington, D.C.—it’s one of the safest cities in the country. It was one of the worst cities in the country if you go back just a little while ago.”
To be clear, it is different: American cities such as Washington, D.C., may be occupied by the National Guard, but U.S. soldiers are not summarily executing people on the streets. Likewise, the spreading abuses associated with ICE’s crackdown fall short of Hamas-level brutality.
Yet Trump’s cavalier acceptance of these horrors, and his instinct to equate them with his own domestic crackdown, is revealing. It shows how easily he sees crime-fighting as a valid pretext for the naked murder of political rivals. It also shows that he observes no distinction between the level of force he ought to be able to apply and the unaccountable cruelty exercised by one of the world’s most ruthless regimes.
