Trump Suddenly Doesn’t Care About Ceasefire He Claims He Brought About

Now that he’s in office, Donald Trump suddenly doesn’t seem so confident in his position on Israel’s war on Palestine.

“How confident are you, Mr. President, that you can keep the ceasefire in Gaza?” asked a reporter in the Oval Office while Trump signed a flurry of executive orders Monday night.

“I’m not confident,” Trump responded. “It’s not our war. It’s their war.”

The comments stood in stark contrast to a more defiant version the forty-seventh president pitched at his inaugural address, in which Trump claimed that America’s success would be measured “not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end.”

And just last week, Trump—who at the time hadn’t been in office for any portion of the war—jumped to take credit for the historic and fledgling ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

“This EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signaled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I am thrilled American and Israeli hostages will be returning home to be reunited with their families and loved ones.”

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the press that “both President Trump and President Biden gave full backing to Israel’s right to return to fighting, if Israel comes to the conclusion that negotiations on Phase B are futile.” Phase two of the ceasefire agreement would see the removal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

But Trump’s perspective on Gaza, which he freely shared on Monday, appeared tainted by his years as a real estate developer. Referring to a photo he had seen of the devastation in the region, Trump referred to Gaza as a “demolition site” before going on to suggest that the territory could be completely remade.

“It’s got to be rebuilt in a different way,” Trump said. “Gaza is interesting. It’s a phenomenal location. On the sea. The best weather. You know, everything is good. Some beautiful things could be done with it, but it’s very interesting. Some fantastic things could be done with Gaza.”

It’s not the first time that a member of the Trump family real estate empire has hinted that Palestine could be a developer’s paradise. In March, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner praised Gaza’s waterfront beachfront property as “very valuable.”

“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner told his interviewer, Harvard’s Middle East Initiative faculty chair Tarek Masoud. “But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.”

Republican lawmakers are already shifting goalposts to justify Trump pardoning or commuting the sentences of nearly 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists—many of whom assaulted police officers, an issue Republicans hold near and dear. 

When asked about the pardons, Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Tuesday pointed the finger at Joe Biden, stating that the former president opened the floodgates by pardoning his son Hunter, according to CNN’s Manu Raju.

“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Thune continued. “I think they were case-by-case.” 

“I assume you’re asking me about the Biden pardons of his family,” said Senator Chuck Grassley, when asked by Semafor’s Burgess Everett. “I’m just talking about the Biden pardons, because that is so selfish.”

“I don’t know whether there were pardons given to individuals who assaulted police officers,”  said Senator Susan Collins, “or whether there were pardons given to people who damaged property, who rummaged through desks, who broke windows in the Capitol. I disagree with those pardons if they were given.”

Pardons were indeed given to individuals who assaulted police officers. Senator Tommy Tuberville told Raju that he “didn’t see it,” referring to the pardons of people who attacked police officers. 

Trump pardoned multiple Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including one man who pepper-sprayed a Capitol Police officer and another who swung a baseball bat at one. 

Congress is trying desperately to undo its own TikTok ban.

Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie introduced legislation Monday to repeal the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, also known as the TikTok ban.

Preventing the TikTok ban has become a top priority for Donald Trump, even though he was the one who originally urged the app to shutter in the United States.

Trump signed an executive order Monday to delay the enforcement of the ban for 75 days, “to permit my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action with respect to TikTok.”

When asked why he changed his mind about TikTok, Trump said that the app was “largely about kids, young kids.”

“If China is gonna get information about young kids—I think, I think, to be honest with you, we’ve got bigger problems with that,” Trump said.

Over the weekend, TikTok preemptively locked out users in the United States, only to return hours later with a message thanking Trump for “providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”

Trump’s sudden swerve to protect the app, which Republicans had spent months railing against, has created stark divides within the party over whether the app actually threatens national security.

TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew was seated on the dais at Trump’s inauguration Monday, signaling a budding alliance with the president. Massie, the Republican who co-sponsored the bill to repeal the ban, posted a photo he’d taken of Chew from the crowd on X. “Tick tock, the TikTok ban is about to end,” Massie wrote.

Former President Joe Biden signed the TikTok ban, which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, less than a year ago, in April 2024.

The much-discussed Department of Government Efficiency is finally coming to fruition—but it’s not the stringent, $2 trillion cost-cutting agency that Elon Musk had promised.

Instead, the executive order Donald Trump signed Monday night officially actualizing the executive branch division is a simple rebrand of something that already exists: the U.S. Digital Service, which has little to do with budget cuts.

“The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President,” the executive order reads.

Part of the mandate includes the development of a subagency, named the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, which will be “dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda.” The temporary subagency will expire on July 4, 2026. The administrator overseeing DOGE will report to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

And in reality, it appears that more bureaucracy will be on the agenda for the memeified division: The executive order requires the hiring of four-person “DOGE teams” for each agency (very efficient, much cost-cutting). They will include an agency-related team lead, an engineer, a human resources specialist, and an attorney, per the order, all in an effort to further advance Trump’s vague and unclear DOGE agenda.

Another executive order further grants DOGE a level of responsibility for enacting a federal hiring plan.

“The Federal Hiring Plan shall provide specific best practices for the human resources function in each agency, which each agency head shall implement, with advice and recommendations as appropriate from DOGE,” the order, titled “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service,” reads.

The first job gutted by DOGE was apparently one of its own potential co-chairs, biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy’s, who was ousted from Trumpworld in recent weeks for seemingly grating on the “rank and file” of the cost-cutting department. Last week, Trump personally implored Ramaswamy to consider taking Ohio’s Senate seat, recently vacated by Vice President JD Vance, if it was offered to him by Governor Mike DeWine. (Of course, it wasn’t, and the billionaire is instead expected to announce a bid to replace the term-limited governor in 2026.)

Musk has promised to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget under the helm of the agency, a sum that constitutes more than Congress has in discretionary spending. Doing so would practically defund the entire executive branch, which doles out funding for the military, national security, and all federal agencies.

On the second day of his presidency, Donald Trump secured yet another victory from his ally Judge Aileen Cannon.

Cannon on Tuesday blocked the Justice Department from sharing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Trump’s classified documents case with select members of Congress. The move is the latest example of Cannon’s deferential treatment to the president, including dismissing the classified documents case six months ago.

While Cannon didn’t block the entire report, protecting a selected volume is certainly to Trump’s advantage. Appointed to the federal bench by Trump in 2020, Cannon presided over his classified documents case and helped the president every step of the way, drawing criticism even from Trump’s former lawyers.

Smith resigned from the Justice Department earlier this month and in November ended his cases on Trump’s 2020 election meddling and hoarding of classified documents. However, he wasn’t issued a preemptive presidential pardon by President Biden, unlike others, and may find himself targeted by Trump’s Justice Department.

The report is the last unresolved part of the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were rendered moot by his election victory in November. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, Trump will likely never see any legal consequences from the crimes he allegedly committed, including his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. For the next four years, as Trump repeatedly stretches the law to his advantage, the public will ask what could have been done to hold him accountable after 2020.

This story has been updated.