Hello and welcome back. There’s so much news this week, we can’t really do it justice. But that’s never stopped us before. Also, if you want to hear my raspy voice, tune in to the latest episode of Eli Lake’s excellent new podcast, Breaking History.
→ Riviera of the Middle East: Trump this week announced the new American plan for Gaza, and it’s wild—even for him. It’s out of the box. It feels like the first idea in the brainstorm—just jamming on a whiteboard. It is for the U.S. to take over and do real estate development in the Gaza Strip. The current residents will be magically gone. And the Trump Team will go in and, what else, build some big-ass hotels:
The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it. . . . Everybody I have spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent in a really magnificent area that nobody would know. . . . And I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so. . . magnificent.
He elaborated on Truth Social:
The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. . . . The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.
Ignoring the Schumer jab, but noting it for later, it sounds like Trump is angling to remake Rick Caruso’s The Grove but in Gaza. Rick Caruso’s The Gaza? Or would it be Gaza, Brought to You by Rick Caruso? Trump is looking at those hostage release videos, the ones where the Red Cross sits at a special signing table with Hamas to make it look sterile and legitimate, and all he sees is white sand and blue Mediterranean. It’s great how Trump is now self-aware enough to get ahead of the most obvious critiques: that he is being cute and a wise guy. Just one more block quote from our commander-in-chief:
If we could build them through massive amounts of money—supplied by other people, very rich nations, and they’re willing to supply it—if we can build something for them in one of the countries—and it could be Jordan, and it could be Egypt, it could be other countries—and you could build four or five or six areas. . . you build really good quality housing, like a beautiful town, like someplace where they can live and not die.
Inspirational. And aspirational. Someplace where they can live and not die does seem like a low bar. Trump thinks a nice cookie-cutter development in Egypt, with marble kitchen islands and attached garages will do the trick, and I say, why not? Just plop a McDonald’s in there, throw up some clapboard siding, and boom: peace in the Middle East.
If you think this is all a joke, here’s Italy’s top diplomat seeming to embrace this Mar-a-Gaza scheme: “Today, it is important to listen carefully to new ideas that have been proposed and to think outside the box.” (So did Michael Oren, in these very pages.)
Sure, Iraq didn’t work, no. Afghanistan also didn’t work. But hear me out, Dick Cheney says, emerging from behind a sofa, wearing a giant cowboy hat: Gaza can be different. Imagine it, boys. America can finally do colonialism right. And what that means is what Americans did to America: Take it over completely, oust all original inhabitants, and then in three generations little Tilly Barrington can do her Khan Yunis land acknowledgment and grab brunch. To be clear: If Israelis think this will be their land and they’re coming to New New York with all their spices and religious people—no, no, silly natives, this is real colonialism.
→ Elon’s boys: When the term was coined, DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—seemed silly and fun, like giving Elon Musk a trucker hat for helping so much in the election. But suddenly it’s become real, and I fear next year we’ll be paying taxes with PepeCoin. For now, Musk and his crew of comically nerdy twentysomethings are taking a sledgehammer to government spending. Musk is trying to keep their names secret, tweeting that it’s “a crime” to publicize and analyze who’s running the most important movement in Washington right now. Sure.
At least one has been discovered to have ridiculously racist past social media posts. He mused things such as: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “Normalize Indian hate.” On Thursday evening, he resigned.
This past week, the clandestine coders of DOGE are looking at the flabbiest-seeming government agency: USAID. It’s already being dismantled.
USAID turns out to be lining coffers for Dems who are between jobs, kind of like the MyPillow of the left. I honestly had no idea how big this grift was. For example: Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s would-be disinformation czar, who resigned after an uproar over her Ministry of Truth, then spent some time at the Centre for Information Resilience, which was partially funded by USAID. USAID was apparently partnering with Burisma, the Ukrainian group where Hunter Biden sat on the board. USAID was also the second-largest funder of the BBC’s charity arm. Which is crazy. We fought a war (a revolutionary one!) so we wouldn’t have to tune in to British propaganda. And now we’re footing the bill?