Trump’s brilliant idea (not)

Only a few days into office, Trump has announced another brilliant new idea: “clean up” Gaza by sending Gazans to Egypt and Jordan. It might sound to you like the old racist ones of transfer and even ethnic cleansing. But he tells us he thought of this all on his own, after thinking the problem through carefully for around five minutes. He’s just that brilliant. But he’s also pro-peace! Already, his contradictory pronouncements, like Bibi’s, insist we can both enforce peace and perpetuate hatred and war.

The thing is, no one seems to be scratching their heads. The left in America has started invoking “Trump world,” a sort of creepy house of mirrors where everything is unrecognizably warped and reversed. I, myself, believe that his new idea for Gaza, his decision to invest billions in AI without instituting safeguards and his immediate orders to deport migrants are all of a piece, and they are less fun-house, more lab run by escaped monkeys. Just think about his biggest supporters and advisors, outside of the oil companies – the tech billionaires who are anti-taxes on the rich, anti-union and anti-restrictions on unrestrained greed. Those may be values associated with conservatives, but their methods of working are anything but old-style. Rather than fine-tune something that mostly works, they would rather break it; rather than assess what already exists, they’ll invent a bunch of new stuff and wait to see which of the nine-and-a-half out of ten things they’ve made will fail. And if everything fails, they’ll just buy a company that’s invented a better app.

Policy-wise, this translates into a lot of smashing, the shards mixed and glued back together to resemble some plastic version of a deep-fake memory of a bygone America. And a bunch of “new” ideas that will absolutely fail.

Failure might be an option for Microsoft or Facebook or Amazon. Their engineers can erase their files and start over. But correct me if I’m wrong: It’s not a great way to run the world.

And I mean the entire world. We are all rats in his lab, because Trump is already in the process of using his new hammer and gluepot to create a new world order. He’s shutting down Ukraine – the whole country – ghosting China and playing ice hockey with Russia and North Korea. As lab rats stuck in this experiment, I think that none of us should be getting too comfortable.

I am told that Trump succeeded in getting the current hostage deal rammed through. It’s a perfect example of a hostile takeover. Both sides were invested in Trump’s election and held out for him, but ultimately, they both realized they’d better secure their assets before he can really get going, because no one is too sure what he’s going to do with the company he’s now bought. The deal, itself, did not change, and his foreign policy team had no hand in working out the details. Our two sides simply allowed him to swoop in and claim the credit.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly happy for the released hostages. But I’m worried it’s a PR stunt without a great deal of substance behind it. Hamas gives out goodbye packages and stages a release event – bizarre, Trump-like attempts to preempt the testimony of the surviving hostages who will tell tales that evoke anything but hospitality. On our side, we’re happy to screen endless loops of young women rushing into the arms of their parents for the first time in over a year, but the return of non-living hostages at the end of the 42 days will present a different narrative. And the media will not be able to censor their families reminding us that a deal back in May could have saved their lives.

For our part, we’re hedging all of our bets. We didn’t mean our take-over of a strip of Syria was temporary; it’s now indefinite. As for Lebanon, we need to stay for the time being. And Gaza? Our coalition is split, one side promised the war will resume, the other, including the ultra-orthodox, voting for continuing hostage negotiations. As usual, Bibi will play for time. He’ll send his schnauzer, Katz, to whimper that we are attacking as we pull back, or working for a peaceful solution as we go back in. Take your pick.

And Trump? He’s coming to visit, and insists he will also go to Gaza. This I want to see. Call me a lab rat, but if you’re going to dissect me, at least let me die laughing.