Collage of snapshots from Trump's "Trump Gaza" video. Photo: BettBeat Media.
By Karim Bettache – Feb 27, 2025
The moral rot at the heart of late-stage capitalism has found its most grotesque expression in Donald Trump’s AI-generated fever dream of a “transformed” Gaza, posted without shame on his own Truth Social platform. Here, in three minutes of digital hallucination—broadcast to his millions of followers—we witness the complete moral collapse of America’s ruling class, their pathological detachment from human suffering, and their messianic delusions of recreating the world in their own twisted image.
The video begins, without irony or shame, amid the apocalyptic ruins of Gaza—a land where American-supplied bombs have possibly killed over 500,000 people, of whom at least half were children. This real-world carnage serves merely as the establishing shot for Trump’s perverted utopia. The message is clear: mass death is simply the necessary prelude to profitable development.
What follows is a pornography of power that would make Napoleon blush. Golden Trump statues rise from blood-soaked earth. Wealthy tourists frolic where Palestinian children once played. Casino lights flash above mass graves. Each frame screams the truth about our ruling class: they do not see human beings; they see assets to be seized and territories to be branded.
This is not merely a promotional video. It is a manifesto of capitalism, where the machinery of mass killing serves as the advance team for real estate development. The transformation Trump envisions—from a living, breathing Palestinian society to a sterile playground for the global rich—represents the ultimate fantasy of capitalism: the complete erasure of indigenous populations and their replacement with profitable ventures.
From pedophilia to necrophilia
The video’s aesthetic touches betray the colonial mindset that has never left the Western ruling class. Arab women are reduced to an orientalist sexual fantasy—an AI-generated scene showing a scantily clad woman dancing intimately with Trump himself. While the—most likely accidental—inclusion of bearded trans dancers seems like a surprisingly modern progressive touch, it merely updates rather than challenges the core colonial fantasy. Whether traditional belly dancers or gender-nonconforming performers, these bodies exist purely as exotic props for the billionaire class’s entertainment. The AI-generated fever dream simply expands the menu of available sexual commodities while maintaining the same power dynamic: colonized bodies performing for the colonizer’s pleasure. It’s not progress—it’s just orientalism with a rainbow capitalist makeover.
What makes this document truly terrifying is not its cartoonish excess but its honesty. Here, finally, is the unvarnished truth about how our oligarchs view the world. The mass death in Gaza is not, in their minds, a humanitarian catastrophe—it is a business opportunity. The displacement of millions is not a tragedy—it is a chance to “develop” prime Mediterranean real estate.
This is the end game of unfettered capitalism: a system so morally bankrupt that it can broadcast its own psychopathy as a promotional video. From Epstein’s pedophilic island playground to necrophilic fever dream of a “transformed” Gaza, the billionaire class has finally dropped its civilized mask. They no longer feel the need to hide their depraved fantasies. The progression is clear—from the sexual exploitation of children in private compounds to publicly fantasizing about building luxury resorts atop mass graves. They show us exactly who they are: merchants of death who see human suffering, whether of trafficked children or bombed civilians, as merely raw material for their grotesque appetites and profits.
The Palestinian journalist Yousef Alalo, speaking with quiet dignity about the Gaza he knew—with its hotels, resorts, and families enjoying the Mediterranean beaches—provides a stark contrast to Trump’s vulgar fantasy. “Gaza would have become Singapore or Dubai,” he notes, “if Israel and the US had allowed Palestinians to build their city or extract the natural gas off their shore.” But actual development, actual prosperity for the Palestinian people, was never the goal.
We are watching, in real time, the complete merger of state violence with corporate greed, of military occupation with luxury real estate development. This is what the end of empire looks like: a gold-plated fever dream built on mountains of corpses.
The most terrifying aspect of Trump’s video is not its content but its context—the fact that it exists at all. That a US president can openly advocate for what amounts to ethnic cleansing and present it as a real estate opportunity marks the complete moral death of Western “civilization.”
Karim Bettache
Prof. Karim Bettache acquired his BSc and MSc in psychology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and his Ph.D. in psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow with the cultural psychologist Professor Chi-yue Chiu and as a lecturer for Monash University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor for the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He specializes in cultural, political, and social psychology. His work attempts to connect individual psychological phenomena (e.g., racism) to broader sociopolitical and historical developments of human societies (e.g., colonialism or capitalism). Hence, his work strongly overlaps with a multitude of social sciences such as sociology and the political sciences.
