The surprising fact about Trump 2.0, in stark contrast to the cold heartlessness of Biden, is how humanitarian Trump is. Sure, he doesn’t gush femininely about how his heart breaks over the poor, sweet victims of war and terrorism. But his policies are driven by humanitarianism. Nearly every time he discusses the Ukraine war or the Gaza debacle, he laments the loss of thousands of young lives and empathizes with the Auschwitz-like emaciation of Hamas’s hostages. He genuinely cares about the suffering of innocent people.
This compassion drives his calculus in drafting policy. He begins by analyzing the harsh realities. There are four potential outcomes of the war in Ukraine: (1) the deadlock continues indefinitely; (2) Ukraine surrenders; (3) Ukraine defeats Russia; (4) they negotiate.
Number One means thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people — mostly young men — die. One of the criteria of a just war is that it is winnable. Pouring young lives into a doomed war is immoral, even if the alternative is not fully punishing the offending nation. You don’t sentence young people to death-by-warfare just to signal your moral outrage. Ukraine can choose this option if they want, but the USA shouldn’t be funding it.
No one but the Russians want Number Two, putting Ukraine under Putin’s boot. It’s probably preferable to One, but we can do better.
Number Three is only possible with large-scale, outside (read: NATO, read: American) participation. That means young Americans returning home in flag-draped coffins. Nearly every day I drive by a large, road-side portrait of Sergeant Colby L. Richmond, who was killed in action in Afghanistan. I do not want to have to drive by the portrait of another of my neighbors lost in Ukraine. I’m sorry if that means Russia gets a de facto pass on its aggression, but the calculus demands it. It is not worth the price in American blood to push the Russians all the way out of Ukraine. Sorry.
That leaves Number Four: Exchanging some Ukrainian territory to end the bloodshed. The humanitarian calculus demands we seek an immediate, negotiated settlement, the very thing Trump is seeking to do.
In Gaza, the calculus leads to another conclusion. Hamas unleashed a barbaric, murderous rampage rivaling the brutality of the worst atrocities of all time. They celebrated their heinous acts, promised to repeat them, and, as recently as a month ago, reveled in the corpses of infants they had strangled to death. Who strangles infants and then celebrates it? Unlike the Russians, who can be contained and have shown that they can even be trusted with nuclear weapons—for 75 years without using them (crossing our collective fingers)—Hamas cannot be trusted to be the neighbors of any civilized people, especially not the Israelis whom they’ve pledged themselves to destroy.
The calculus, then, is simple, the way to best reduce future killing is to destroy Hamas. That means killing their terrorists and relocating their civilian base. That is what Trump has been hinting at with his dreams of the USA somehow owning Gaza without invading it. Skeptics ask how that can be achieved. Fill in the blanks. If the USA is to have Trump’s vision of Gaza without invading, someone — like the nation to whom Trump has been giving 2,000-pound bombs — will have to obliterate the remainder of Hamas and move out Hamas supporters. Trump is egging on Israel to do that very thing, with the reward that the USA will then pour vast investments into Gaza. He’s giving Israel the stick and promising them a carrot.
Hamas did this to themselves when they infected their souls with rabid, murderous ideology. One of the images I remember from my early childhood is seeing on TV a South Vietnamese agent take a Viet-Cong fighter, having him kneel, put a revolver to his head, and blow his brains out. The squishy left, of course, used that to undermine American morale, that we shouldn’t be supporting such executions, they said. But the real lesson is that sometimes some people become so infected with a murderous ideology that the only way to get it out of their heads, and so save the lives of others, is to do what that South Vietnamese agent did.
Hamas is that Viet-Cong fighter. A rational, humanitarian calculus demands that Israel do what that agent did to him. Hamas won’t stop killing. So, if the killing is going to stop, Hamas must be killed. Its civilian base is irredeemable. The best-case scenario is that they are dispersed into other Arab countries where, hopefully, over generations, they assimilate and disappear. Trump understands this. He sees that the only way to minimize the killing is to eradicate Hamas, level Gaza, and start again. If, at the end, there’s a Trump hotel and golf course there, that’s just a bonus.
Trump’s calculus isn’t just a simple body count: whatever produces the least corpses is best. As an America-first patriot, he values American lives over those of other nations, even allies, like Israel. What he’s implicitly encouraging Israel to do will cost Israeli lives; not as many, he figures, as the futile hope of confining Hamas while waiting for the next October 7. But he doesn’t want it to cost any American lives. That’s why NATO involvement in Ukraine is off the table, even if it means a weaker negotiating position with Putin. It might cost Ukraine some territory, but that’s better than costing us any more Colby Richmond-like memorials.
This is Trump’s incarnation of Vice President Vance’s “ordo amoris” (order of love). He loves all lives. He loves the lives of his fellow Americans more than others. If he calculates that some lives have to end so that more other lives flourish, he’ll give the order, and send the bombs. If another nation — like Israel — will do the dangerous job of ending those toxic lives for us, so much the better. The calculus is America-first and humanitarian.
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.
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