David Remnick
More than five hundred years ago, Machiavelli, the philosopher of political practice and modern republicanism, suggested, in “Discourses on Livy,” that “at times it is a very wise thing to simulate madness.” Richard Nixon, according to his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, apparently arrived at a similar conclusion, saying, “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
On Tuesday, President Trump appeared alongside the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the East Room at the White House, and declared that the two million Palestinians in Gaza should be forced out of the Strip. The United States would “take over” Gaza and “own” it. The Palestinians, after having suffered tens of thousands of deaths and the destruction of countless homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, and other infrastructure, would, it appears, have nothing to say about any of this and would be sent . . . elsewhere. Egypt. Jordan. Whatever. It hardly seemed to matter to Trump that such a policy represents ethnic cleansing. Morality is of no interest when there is a real-estate deal to be made.
“We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal, 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—this could be so magnificent,” Trump said. (The Riviera: “A sunny place for shady people,” as W. Somerset Maugham put it.) “We’ll make sure that it’s done world-class,” Trump went on, building on the real-estate pitch. As he’d noted earlier in the day, “It doesn’t have to be one area, but you take certain areas and you build really good-quality housing, like a beautiful town, like someplace where they can live and not die, because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying.”
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