Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“Meshuggener”
—Yiddish word for “crazy person.”
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
– H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920.
Donald Trump has occupied the White House for only three weeks, and the term “crazy town,” which former chief of staff John Kelley applied to Trump’s Washington in the first term, is gaining greater credibility and meaning. According to Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” Kelly said that Trump was an “idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails We’re in Crazytown. I don’t know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
Kelly can say “I told you so,” because “Crazytown” is back. There’s Canada as the 51st state; the Gulf of America, which is waiting for the official geographer to change our maps; the possible seizure of the Panama Canal; and of course the purchase of Greenland for U.S. national security. But the plan to seize and rebuild the Gaza Strip, removing two million Palestinians in order to create the “Riviera of the Middle East,” could not be more bizarre and zany.
On the other hand, what would you expect from three real estate developers: Trump, his special envoy Stephen Witkoff, and his prodigal son-in-law Jared Kushner, who told an audience at Harvard University—his alma mater—about the wonderful development opportunities on the 25 miles of sunset-facing Gaza waterfront. Add to the list of real estate developers, David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, who called the idea “brilliant and out of the box creative and frankly the only solution I’ve heard in 50 years that has the chance of actually changing the dynamics in that troubled part of the world.”
Well, “the world” didn’t exactly react in the way that Friedman opined. The three key Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan) that were supposed to support this operation and absorb many or most of the displaced Palestinians immediately rejected the idea. All three leaders of these states knew that the mere announcement of the idea would contribute to the destabilization of the region, particularly Jordan that already has a Palestinian majority that creates significant political tension. The Palestinians themselves, who have faced illegal and immoral displacement from the Israelis for the past 75 years and barely survived Israel’s current genocidal campaign, didn’t share Trump’s view regarding the “kindness” of his plan.
Only the right-wing troglodytes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security cabinet and within America’s pro-Israel community endorsed the idea. Netanyahu, who was given little advance notice of Trump’s plan, was smirking as Trump was speaking, which suggested that even he knew that he was in “Crazytown,” Between smirks, Netanyahu kept looking over to Ron Dermer, his national security adviser, with a look of disbelief. After achieving a free hand for his military campaign from the Biden administration, Netanyahu presumably realizes that he currently has a U.S. administration that also will provide “carte blanche” for his policies, although it will require careful handling from time to time.
It took the Trump administration less than 24 hours to try to clean up the international mess that it had created. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is clearly over her head in this position, explained that Egypt and Jordan would only have to take in the Gazan population on a “temporary” basis. Temporary? Middle East envoy Witkoff told Trump that it would take decades and dollars to simply remove the rubble that Israel has created in Gaza. As for the dollars, Trump’s plan for Gaza came on the heels of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which presumably would have been central to any task of a territory that Israel has made uninhabitable.
Leavitt also had to explain that Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. military would be involved in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza did not mean he was “committed to putting boots on the ground.” Leavitt had all sorts of trouble dealing with the press corps simply because she was explaining a “plan” that had never been discussed at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, or in the intelligence community. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who is clearly over his head, referred to the “plan” as “very bold” with “fresh new ideas.” He didn’t think that it “should be criticized in any way.”
And if this craziness wasn’t sufficiently bizarre and zany, on the very day that the White House was in partial retreat from its plan, it received an email from the Central Intelligence Agency that listed all employees hired over the past two years. This in itself was not unusual, but the fact it was sent as an unclassified email was a counter-intelligence nightmare. I can hear the laughter from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping who foresee better days ahead for their own national security situations vis-a-vis a much diminished United States.
