One of the best persuasion tactics is “thinking past the sale.” The salesperson isn’t just telling you that the product or service is great and that you’re getting a great price. Instead, he’s telling you to imagine how wonderful things will be once you own that product or service.

Trump is doing that with his Gaza proposal, which envisions Gaza as a “magnificent” resort area on the Mediterranean Coast. What only a few astute journalists noticed is that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, already started making this sale in 2019. Trump envisions the U.S. not as a colonizer but as a project manager.

Here’s what Kushner was proposing in June 2019:

The “peace to prosperity” plan, set to be presented by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner at an international conference in Bahrain next week, includes 179 infrastructure and business projects, according to details of the plan and interviews with U.S. officials. The approach toward reviving the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process was criticized by the Palestinians on Saturday.

The ambitious economic revival plan, the product of two years of work by Kushner and other aides, would take place only if a political solution to the region’s long-running problems is reached.

More than half of the $50 billion would be spent in the economically troubled Palestinian territories over 10 years while the rest would be split between Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Some of the projects would be in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, where investments could benefit Palestinians living in adjacent Gaza, a crowded and impoverished coastal enclave.

The plan also proposes nearly a billion dollars to build up the Palestinians’ tourism sector, a seemingly impractical notion for now given the frequent flareups between Israeli forces and militants from Hamas-ruled Gaza, and the tenuous security in the occupied West Bank.

The Trump administration hopes that wealthy Gulf states and nations in Europe and Asia, along with private investors, would foot much of the bill, Kushner told Reuters.

I remember back in 2019 listening to Scott Adams, himself a master persuader, saying how brilliantly Kushner presented this plan. To use a very Kamala term, Kushner was proposing “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

However, unlike Kamala, who was proposing to turn the Judeo-Christian, free-market, free-speech America into a pie-in-the-sky communist *ahem* paradise, Kushner was proposing a practical “boots on the ground” idea. The important thing, though, in Kushner’s case, is that the boots he was proposing weren’t military boots; they were construction workers’ boots.

What helps this time is that thanks to Hamas’s effing around and finding out, a lot of the demolition work that’s a necessary predicate to the rebuilding, is already done. Likewise, again thanks to Hamas’s unwise decision-making, the one-time residents in the region have already relocated, whether temporarily or permanently. That makes a rebuild easy, especially because there won’t be California-style environmental regulations turning the project into a 25-year odyssey.

Trump is no fool. He recognizes that Gaza is a tar baby, so the last thing in the world he wants is to establish an American colony there with all the headaches that entails. Instead, he’s telling the surrounding Arab nations that they can improve their situation, too, if they get on board with developing the region instead of letting it exist as a festering carbuncle on the derriere of the Muslim world. He’s helping them “think past the sale” and promising them that, if they do, they’ll have the best project manager in the world at their side.

Image: YouTube screen grab.