Though sworn enemies, Hamas and Donald Trump seem to share a common language

Donald Trump departs the White House May 12. Photo by Getty Images

Aviya Kushner May 13, 2025

The wild seesawing on tariffs has moved markets and moods — and left strange marks on our language.

“Their fingerprints are all over the economy,” NPR’s popular Marketplace program began, referring to — no surprise — tariffs, on Thursday night, which seems like a lifetime ago. And yes, that was a personification of tariffs.

Ever since tariffs have been announced, host Amy Scott noted, “people have been feeling much worse about their own economic situation.”

The language of it all is making everyone’s mood even worse. For starters, there is the minimization of pain that feels like a type of gaslighting.

“There will be a little disturbance. But we’re OK with that. It won’t be much,” Trump told a joint session of Congress in March.

And in a cabinet meeting in early May, Trump said rising prices due to tariffs might mean “children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls.”

Next, we keep hearing that tariffs will bring glory.

“I always say ‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” Trump said at a rally shortly after his inauguration in January. “Because tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

The language of sacrifice

If this sounds chillingly familiar, it may be because the linguistic cocktail of minimizing pain and maximizing promised glory is the one favored by slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

In written messages to Hamas leaders that The Wall Street Journal revealed, Sinwar chillingly called the deaths of thousands of Palestinians after Oct. 7 “necessary sacrifices.”

And after the deaths of three of his sons in an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar said their deaths and those of other Gazans during the war would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

Of course, there is no parallel between losing some money in a trade war and losing lives, but it’s hard not to notice that both are being framed as necessary sacrifices.

And it’s not just Sinwar. Other Hamas leaders have also opined that sacrificing Gazans’ lives is OK with them. The price, they say, is worth it.

“Let us examine history. Let us look at Algeria, Vietnam, and other countries that we liberated. How many did they sacrifice? Millions of martyrs. Therefore, I am saying that there is a high price to pay on the path of resistance, and we will bear this price,” Ayman Shanaa, head of Hamas in Sidon, Lebanon, said on Lebanese television in November 2023.

Unlike Americans, Gazans haven’t had a chance to vote in the past year, or frankly since 2006.

Some Palestinian writers have been quick to point out that Hamas — not the Palestinian people — made all the choices here.

“It was a single faction [i.e. Hamas] on its own, without consulting anybody and without taking anybody else’s opinion into consideration,” Bassem Barhoum, a columnist for the Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote.

“They acted alone and they — not the Palestinian people — bear the responsibility for their decision. It was an entirely reckless adventure, and it brought about a national catastrophe.”

Dangerous promises

Now that Hamas and the U.S. are apparently negotiating directly — as the release of Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander after 584 days in captivity shows — it’s interesting to consider what common ground they have found.

On Israeli television last night, host Niv Raskin of Channel 12 asked a guest what is going on in Trump’s head. While it’s impossible for anyone to answer that, maybe Trump is considering whether the idea of sacrifice is still compelling to most American citizens.

“As a political matter, history shows that it is highly dangerous for a president to offer the prospect of sacrifice in the cause of long-term benefits,” Jeff Greenfield noted in Politico.

“Even when the case for suffering is due to a legitimate threat to national survival, Americans are a lot more willing to endure the theoretical impact than the reality. Trump, in fact, may be even more likely than his predecessors to bear the brunt of the public’s impatience.”

Sure, Trump has his elated supporters among Americans, as his rallies and election results show. And Sinwar certainly had his enthralled supporters among Gazans, as cheering mobs have indicated.

According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, “70% of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the role played by Hamas during the war, with 61% also approving of the role played by its Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar,” as All Arab News reported in March 2024.

But now, whether it’s rising disapproval ratings in America — The Economist’s daily tracker has it at 52% right now — or hundreds of brave Gazans demonstrating against Hamas, not everyone is on board. In April, some even shouted that “Hamas is garbage,” according to the BBC.

Maybe those fingerprints of displeasure are getting harder to smudge out.