Two years ago, J. D. Vance wrote for the Wall Street Journal endorsing Donald Trump on the grounds that Trump was antiwar. In the op-ed, Vance brought up the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates in a way that suggested Trump had brought peace to the Middle East by brokering that deal.

In February, Trump held a press conference with the most notorious war criminal on the planet. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu just spent fifteen months reducing Gaza to rubble. Twenty-five miles long and six miles wide, the Gaza Strip now has the world’s largest population of child amputees. As Netanyahu grinned from ear to ear, Trump laid out a plan for the United States to step in and finish the job.

The United States, Trump said, should “take over” Gaza. “We’ll own it.” Its entire population of around two million Palestinians would leave. The United States would raze all the destroyed buildings, “level it out,” and rebuild the territory from scratch as the “Riviera of the Middle East.” When pressed by reporters about whether Palestinians would be allowed to come back after the rebuilding was done, Trump asked, “Why would they want to return? That place has been hell.”