Several advisers to Mr. Trump said they expected the Gaza ownership idea to die away quietly as it became clear to Mr. Trump that it was unfeasible. And that already seemed to be happening by Wednesday afternoon.In a separate Times story, Patrick Kingsley told us not to worry our pretty little minds, because Trump didn't really mean what he said.
But it is the very outlandishness of Mr. Trump’s plan that signaled to some that it was not meant to be taken literally.So relax! Trump won't actually pursue this terrible idea!
Just as Mr. Trump has often made bold threats elsewhere that he ultimately has not enacted, some saw his gambit in Gaza as a negotiating tactic aimed at forcing compromises from both Hamas and from Arab leaders.
But, in fact, Trump told us on Truth Social this morning at 6:32 Eastern time that yes, he intends to pursue this:
(No, I have no idea why he's calling Chuck Schumer a Palestinian.)
You can argue that the elite media sanewashes Trump and his henchmen because elite media outlets actually support Trump and are pleased that he's doing what he's doing. But if that were true, I think stories and editorials critical of Trump would disappear altogether in these news outlets. The Times endorsed Kamala Harris. It publishes writers such as Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg who regularly denounce Trump. I think we have a different problem.
When you're a successful journalist, it's easily to fall into the habit of believing that the system works and powerful people are sincerely trying to do a good job -- after all, powerful people rewarded you with a plum position at The New York Times or CNN or The Atlantic. Your life is good, so the system must be benevolent.
If that's your worldview, it might be hard for you to imagine that functioning institutions could be taken over by madmen and simply stop working properly. You assume something like that can't really happen. The news organizations that have employed you have functioned well. The government you cover has always functioned well enough to sustain the country's status as the globe's dominant power. If you've gone from birth in an economically comfortable family to good school after good school and a series of mentor-mentee relationships that have efficiently advanced your career until you're finally at or near the top of your profession, maybe the idea of a complete breakdown in any system is impossible for you to imagine.
The two men running the country have their own problems imagining calamity. Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are sons of rich men who became even richer. Trump has experienced what should have been calamity -- at one point in his life, he was nearly a billion dollars in debt -- but he survived that. His political viability survived a mass casualty event in the final year of his first term, and lawyers, ideologue judges, and a massive army of right-wing propagandists got him through multiple legal cases.
So he thinks he's bulletproof -- as does Musk, who ran Twitter into the ground, build cars that regularly catch on fire, and is still the richest man in the world, and getting richer by the day.
Last night I watched the final episode of HBO's Chernobyl, which I'd missed when it first aired. That final episode dramatizes the events leading to the Chernobyl meltdown.
The disaster occurred while running a test to simulate cooling the reactor during an accident in blackout conditions. The operators carried out the test despite an accidental drop in reactor power, and due to a design issue, attempting to shut down the reactor in those conditions resulted in a dramatic power surge. The reactor components ruptured and lost coolants, and the resulting steam explosions and meltdown destroyed the containment building, followed by a reactor core fire that spread radioactive contaminants across the USSR and Europe.In the HBO dramatization, an arrogant plant supervisor orders workers to conduct the test and continue carrying it out despite their strenuous objections. We all know what happened.
I thought of this while reading a CNN story about Musk's takeover of Twitter and the lessons it holds for federal workers:
... former Twitter employees say Musk sees laws, regulations and procedures as unnecessary speed bumps meant to be ignored.As far as Musk is concerned, nothing terrible has happened as a result of this incident or any other moment of reckless at Twitter -- it's still up and running, it still has millions of users, it's now a highly successful far-right propaganda outlet, and he's still stinking rich. So now that he has access to government computers that can have a literal life-or-death impact on millions of Americans, he undoubtedly thinks, Fuck it -- what's the worst that can go wrong?
... For example, in an infamous incident, the billionaire unexpectedly forced a Twitter team to take one of the company’s data centers offline for cost savings on Christmas Eve in 2022. According to [a] former senior employee, best practice would have been for the servers to be wiped clean for data privacy reasons, but they were not.
“When we were going to shut down this data center, the people from the data center team worked with him, and were basically saying, ‘Look, if we want to do this and do it safely, it’s going to take ... like six months or eight months,’” the former senior employee said. “(Musk’s) like, ‘Ah, f**k that.’”
And Trump will continue to empower Musk and toss out reckless policy proposals because his life has been an uninterrupted luxury vacation for more than four gold-plated decades. (See also Robert Kennedy Jr., who continued to live a life of privilege, ease, and sexual excess even after his father and uncle were assassinated and he became a youthful heroin addict. He's fine. No one he knows personally has lost a child to a disease that can be prevented by a vaccine.)
And while the reporters who cover these men haven't lived lives that are nearly as soft, they fall into the habit of believing that the system -- which has always worked for them -- will prevent everything from going completely off the rails. In 2025, that's not a safe assumption.
