Greeted as Liberators

What could go wrong?

Well, that was something.

Yesterday, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu stood side by side in the White House, announcing a plan that left the press corps—indeed, the entire world—in a state of near-instant shock. Susie Wiles looked positively stricken, as if she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard.

And what was that, exactly?

Oh, just a proposal for the United States to dispatch its military into Gaza, relocate more than a million people to some unspecified “new locale,” and then take over Gaza itself—all while promising to transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Pause and consider: Donald Trump just openly committed American arms, honor, and credibility to forcibly expel Gaza’s Palestinian population and redevelop the territory into a glittering tourist hub.

Yes, it sounds entirely unhinged, and it may torpedo any remaining hope of an enduring Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. It also hands every Islamist militant group an airtight propaganda victory: proof, in their eyes, that the United States is indeed the “Great Satan.”

It’s sounds insane because it is. It sounds manic because it is. It sounds deranged because it is.

Was it a clever ruse to distract us from Elon’s roaring bonfire of government arson at the hands of his incel squad? Let’s not give Trump that much credit.

Why did the press and the political class take the bait, again?

Much of it stems from the persistent, and persistently wrong, assumption that Trump acts with coherent intent, good counsel, sound judgment, and the nation’s interests at heart. In reality, he is a figure of chaos, a “last-person-heard” president who leaps from one manic idea to the next.

This is the same man who, throughout the 2025 campaign, boasted about “no new wars” and stoked nationalist isolationism—promising to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, and forever bragging (falsely) the world was a quiet glade of restful peace during his first term. Now, those same supporters who once clamored for an “America First” retreat behind our two oceans are cheering a ludicrous scheme to become Gaza’s new landlords

“Ruprecht, do you want the genital cuff?"“

Worse, this kind of posturing gives Netanyahu a pretext to level Gaza entirely, reducing it to finer-grained rubble and dust with the comforting thought that the Americans will pick up the pieces afterward. “I see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, maybe the entire Middle East,” Trump declared. A retired general confided to me, “This is thousands of American boys waiting to die. It’ll make Iraq in 2007 look calm.”

Of course, none of this will likely come to pass.

Even before last night this week has been disastrous for Trump.

He’s reeling, even among his most loyal supporters, who usually convince themselves he can do no wrong—yet have watched him effectively light his political ass on fire repeatedly this week.

On trade, for instance, he’s been saber-rattling about annexing Canada as the 51st state and forcing Mexico to capitulate. Let’s be abundantly clear: Canada and Mexico rolled Trump like a cheap rug. They played to his vanity, his lack of knowledge, and his shallow thinking to make him bark like a dog.

Meanwhile, China—an actual peer competitor— is retaliating with its own economic sanctions. Trade wars, it turns out, are not “easy to win” when your adversaries hold significant leverage.

The grand illusion has always been Trump’s self-styled mastery of negotiation. In truth, he’s no business titan—he’s a showman who often capitulates when faced with real pressure. I recounted in my first book how he paid an absurdly high price for a piece of South Florida property after some people I know named a ridiculous figure upfront. Convinced he was the ultimate dealmaker, he never even blinked. They walked away richer; he, none the wiser.

When Trump woke up Monday, I imagine he expected a triumphant week.

He’s getting rubber-stamp approvals from the GOP Senate on his nominees, and Elon is still going from department to department with a gas can and matches.

Yet the fiasco over Gaza reveals a deepening rift and an administration struggling to cope with a president whose reality often diverges from everyone else’s.

The widely photographed look on Susie Wiles’s face spoke volumes: even insiders realize nothing and no one controls Trump. He is a man who is, by all appearances, is both mentally unstable and cognitively unable to process reality beyond his own mental architecture

Anyone betting America will endure another four years of this chaos is taking a risky gamble. The damage is mounting, and even red-state leaders are slowly waking up to the danger of entrusting government after government function to the most extreme and least capable loyalists.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk—whom Trump bizarrely placed in charge of various major projects— operates beyond the control of Trump, his feckless and weak White House Staff, and reality itself.

So here we are, staring at the prospect of an American invasion of Gaza, the forced relocation of a million Palestinians, and talk of building a Middle East Riviera atop the rubble.

It defies belief, but it’s emblematic of the last, desperate illusion: that Donald Trump knows what he’s doing. When it doesn’t happen, his people will declare him a genius. If it does, they will declare him a genius.

For Trump, that’s all that really matters.