The chief thing is to learn to think bluntly. Blunt thinking [plumpes denken] is great thinking. Politics is the pursuit of business by unbusiness-like methods.
Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
Even after a decade of numbing, normalising ubiquity, the mountebank-in-chief still has the power to shock. Yet despite, or more likely because of its sheer brazenness, Trump’s proposal to ‘do a job’ on Gaza, his kitschly dystopian sales brochure pabulum about ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’, feels reassuringly familiar. Of course the only thing Trump can see in the aftermath of a genocide is an investment opportunity. Like a crass, postmodern Domitian, he would build a beachfront condo and call it peace.
We are categorically reassured, by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen among many others, that Trump’s plan won’t happen – that it’s a flagrant breach of international law (which has shielded Gaza so effectively these last 15 months); that it will be blocked by the Arab states (those ever steadfast defenders of the Palestinian cause). We are reminded of our perennial mistake when dealing with Trump: taking him literally, but not seriously. There is, however, an opportunity in taking Trump's modest proposal both literally and seriously.
It is often said that what is disorienting about Trump is that he represents both rupture and continuity. The continuities are constitutive. In his greed, his ruthlessness, his snarling hatred and contempt for those in his power, Trump is imperium’s id, innate, integral. The rupture, by contrast, can appear superficial, consisting merely in transgression against a sanctimonious cult of political etiquette. But, as everyone knows from everyday life, such norms and niceties matter and to breach them is to imperil the whole finely balanced social edifice. The signal service Trump does us is exactly this. In ‘saying the quiet parts out loud’ he intensifies the contradictions and exposes the hypocrisies that undergird too-late capitalism.
Probably the most perfect expression of this propensity came early in his first term, with his unimprovable response to Bill O’Reilly’s pearl-clutching assertion that Vladimir Putin was ‘a killer’. Trump:
There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?1
Now, Trump’s vulgar designs on Gaza – or, strictly speaking, the international reaction to them – free us to ask some vulgar questions of our own: the naive, the obvious, yet inadmissible questions.
For example: If the forced removal of the Palestinians from Gaza in 2025 constitutes ‘ethnic cleansing’ (as the UN lost no time in warning that it would) and a ‘serious violation of international law’ (per the French foreign ministry), how then are we to characterise the forced removal of the Palestinians in 1948? Or the ongoing seizure and settlement since 1967 of what scraps of territory were left to them in the wake of that cataclysm? How then to describe the very founding and, by extension, the fundamental character of the Israeli state? If the Palestinians of Gaza have the right to ‘return home’, as Keir Starmer solemnly asserted in the House of Commons, does that mean to their actual homes within historic Palestine? Such a right is, as the erstwhile human rights lawyer Starmer undoubtedly knows, enshrined in the sacred writ of international law.
It is futile to criticise our leaders when they pay obeisance to Trump. It is not Starmer’s craven praise for Trump’s role in brokering the Gaza ceasefire (a tribute even he must now surely regret) that should disgust us. The real outrage is when he and his ilk tut Trump’s excesses and wring their hands over a massacre they zealously defended and enabled. (‘There’s a lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers.’)
Against the bien pensant cant of the respectable political class and the commentariat, we must have the courage to deploy Brechtian plumpes denken, to express the crude thoughts that might come into their own in action,2 to always intensify the contradictions. This is the unexpected opportunity Trump's coarseness affords us: to make only the coarsest demands.3
Of course, I realise that Trump thinks having a lot of killers is a good thing, that he admires and respects killers, that he believes innocence is for schmucks. But still.
‘There are many people to whom a dialectician means a lover of subtleties. In this connection it is particularly useful when Brecht puts his finger on ‘crude thinking’ [plumpes denken] which produces dialectics as its opposite, contains it within itself, and has need of it. Crude thoughts belong to the household of dialectical thinking precisely because they represent nothing other than the application of theory to practice: its application to practice, not its dependence on practice. Action can, of course, be as subtle as thought. But a thought must be crude in order to come into its own in action.’
Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht
'There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.'
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia,
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