NEW YORK – Want to help run Gaza? It will cost your country $1bn and Donald Trump will control where your money is spent.
It sounds like the kind of AI-generated meme that the US President is fond of posting on social media, only this time it appears to be real.
The plan for Trump’s “Board of Peace”, Bloomberg reports, is that each member state will pay $1bn (£748m) for three years’ membership to the body, which will rebuild Gaza after the war with Israel.
The US President has sent letters of invitation to heads of government to join the board, chaired by Trump himself, which now appears to have a global remit.
The draft charter states that the board seeks to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict”. This has not gone down well in Europe, which sees the Board of Peace as a self-interested rival to the United Nations.
But that may be the point for Trump. The US President’s business model is founded on two things: personal loyalty to him and self-enrichment. When it comes to rebuilding the Middle East, this is exactly what we have come to expect from a man who always wants something for himself.
The proposal for the Board of Peace is indeed shocking and outrageous, but viewed through the lens of Trump’s previous projects, entirely predictable.
The US President’s “Trump Gold Card” investment visa for foreigners in the US, announced in December last year, is a classic example of the Trump way. Those applying for the visa will have to pay $1m (£748,000) and a $15,000 (£11,200) processing fee, $2m (£1.5m) for companies. Fees for a “Platinum Card” rise to a staggering $5m (£3.7m).
Yet it turns out that the programme relies on a loophole and that Trump is actually massively inflating the fees for existing visa categories.
There is a through line that runs through many of Trump’s endeavours: splashy announcements, a large upfront fee for participants and highly mixed outcomes, to say the least.
Let us not forget the debacle of Trump University, the for-profit series of courses in real estate and wealth creation that led to a $25m (£18.7m) settlement with participants in 2016. Under the terms of the settlement, Trump University did not admit wrongdoing for encouraging applicants to pay up to $35,000 (£26,148) for so-called experts who were “hand-picked” by Trump and claimed participants could earn up to $1m a year.
All this should serve as a warning to nations asked by Trump to pay $1bn to be on his Board of Peace, including Sir Keir Starmer, who has been offered a place on the body but may still find a request for money sent to Downing Street.
The scale is much larger but the point is the same – this is classic Trump.
We also know that this is how Trump negotiates, by starting with an outrageous first offer that causes the other side to baulk. Once they have calmed down, they will agree to something that is less one-sided but still favourable to Trump, or so the thinking goes.
This is not negotiating in good faith; this is a bully trying to extract as much as he can from the other side to claim a win for himself and for the US.
The problem for other nations, of course, is that in this case, the bully in question is the President of the world’s most powerful nation.
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As we saw this week with Trump’s absurd plans to take over Greenland, if he doesn’t get what he wants, he retaliates, in this case by slapping 10 per cent tariffs on EU nations that oppose him, as well as Britain.
Unfortunately for Starmer and EU leaders, they are in an impossible situation: pay up and you have no guarantee of winning any influence over Trump, who will do as he pleases anyway.
Fail to hand over the money and you risk the wrath of a US President who takes delight in punishing anyone who disobeys him.
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