Day 222 of Donald Trump’s presidency, and Russia’s war in Ukraine – which he promised to end on day one – shows no sign of having got the memo. This was not a single-use Trump promise; he made it at least 53 times. Yet the US president has failed to keep it, either literally or in his favourite manner: figuratively. Can you figuratively end a war? Not even, apparently.
What his most recent round of failure means, however, is that Trump is pivoting back to another war, the grotesquely horrifying and unlawful humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. Not the way he’d phrase it, possibly. This week he swerved commenting on either Israel’s invasion of Gaza City or the mounting declarations that famine and starvation are clearly under way in the territory, and instead announced: “I think within the next two, three weeks, you’re going to have a pretty good, conclusive ending.” Righto. Trump’s recipe for an ending to the horror has hitherto seemed to resemble the famous business plan of the South Park gnomes. Phase 1: Collect Underpants. Phase 2: ?. Phase 3: Profit.
In the US president’s version, this ran along the following lines. Phase 1. Grotesquely horrifying and unlawful humanitarian catastrophe. 2. ? 3. Beach resort. Strange to look at the Yalta conference photo of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt and think how much more quickly the three allied wartime leaders could have wrapped things up had they shunned various complexities and understood the world as a simple selection of waterfront real-estate opportunities. And yet, perhaps even stranger to imagine that while we don’t have a group selfie of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, the curse of our times is that the fate of so many appallingly desperate and persecuted people in the world hinges on three men who might well be imagined to be in jail were they not in office.
But these are the realities. The path to peace in Gaza runs through Trump, not social media posts, or window flags, or creatives “using their platform”, or any of the other gestures that, while the wishful might cast them as speaking truth to power, in fact only throw our era’s increasingly pervasive sense of powerlessness into even sharper relief.
Nor, in any non-gnome sense, does it run anywhere near Ed Davey’s announcement this week that after much thought and prayer, he would not be attending the king’s banquet for Trump during his forthcoming state visit. It goes without saying that Trump wouldn’t have the first clue who the Liberal Democrat leader is. (More pressingly for Davey, and perhaps more in his power to do something about, is the polling this week that showed that 35% of his own Lib Dem voters also haven’t the first clue who he is when shown a photo of him.) But Davey believes boycotting dinner is the best way he can “send a message to both Trump and Starmer” that they cannot wish the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza away. He means well, yet this gesture still feels one rung above a tweet – or, indeed, a Guardian newspaper column, which is how he announced it. Regrettably, neither of the above are levers in international conflict.
Being unable to plot a path to answers means a question dominates our turbulent age: is being well-meaning enough? Is it, in fact, all I can be? Have I acquitted my responsibilities in the face of historic horror by posting about it, or attacking someone else for not posting about it, or by suggesting that someone cannot care about any subject on which they have not done a post? Perhaps it’s nice to think so, but I fear that far from being the most engaged, those who live like this are the most beaten. Some of the worst people in the world – at least, some of the worst people without access to state armies – run the social media companies, and the idea that spending comfortable hours policing their platforms, working for them for free, is taking a stand or showing you care in any useful way tips beyond bizarre into cultural sickness.
Social media claimed to connect and empower people – a populist promise if ever you heard one – and yet what many of us hear our friends and family say all the time in conversations about the news is that they feel powerless. People have been atomised and narcotised by this supposedly unifying and uplifting technology, and when the great perspective of history is afforded to our descendants and perhaps even our future selves, we might well find that most of our present crises were catalysed by it rather than cured by it. This morning I saw a much-shared cut-out of Travis Kelce kissing Taylor Swift in their engagement photo, superimposed on top of a war-demolished building, above a bell hooks quote: “All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.” Dear me. Stick it in a time capsule, along with an apology note for the cultural rubble it’ll have to be dug out of.
At operational level, however, things don’t change. The path to peace still goes through politicians with power. Many of them are still terrible people. They will still have to have unpleasant and even “toxic” conversations in which horse-trading and moral compromise are inevitable. And yet these things are still desirable, because this is the way it has always ended. This is the way the bombs go silent, the way the children stop starving, the way the hideous carnage ends. It is a long, perilous and precarious path – but history has made it familiar, because it is the only one that actually gets anywhere near where we need to go.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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