President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 4, 2025.

What President Donald J. Trump proposed this past week was nothing short of the forced eviction of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The damage he did in a matter of a few words — to the presidency, to America, to Israel and to the cause of peace in the Middle East — is incalculable.

There he was, at a news conference Tuesday evening with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declaring, “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it. … We’re going to take over that place, we’re going to develop it, we’re going to create thousands of thousands of jobs and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.”

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The real estate developer and reality TV star-turned-president said Gaza would be “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

It was an echo of Mr. Trump’s bizarre COVID-19 ideas about injecting bleach or shining light inside people’s bodies as cures — the musings of a man who........

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