| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a special government employee of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. The Riviera of the Middle East | In today's edition of Am I Hallucinating or Is This Real Life ... Must everything be a real estate deal for President Donald Trump? Gaza is not a casino site. Nor is it a golf destination. In the words of Marc Champion, it is "a highly complex, 70-year-old territorial dispute, made intractable by the politics of identity, religion, national determination and an accumulated history of violence and hate from both sides." And yet the US president can't help but see dollar signs when looking at this map: On Wednesday afternoon, Trump officials raced to soften his mind-boggling announcement that "the US will take over the Gaza Strip" and turn it into the "Riviera of the Middle East." The president's words shocked leaders around the world, including Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who stood by his side during the press conference. "We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site," he said, adding that Gazans would relocate to neighboring countries and start a life so "beautiful" they wouldn't dream of returning. While it's tempting to dismiss this scheme as the usual Trump bluster — or what Marc calls "talking crazy to force incremental wins," we can't. Indeed, he says there's a nonzero chance that this administration is very, very serious about turning the war-torn territory into "Mar-A-Gaza." "Trump was reading from prepared remarks," he notes. "His logic and language were those of any unscrupulous real estate developer, including his approach to the territory's current, Palestinian, residents." Those people — about two million in total — would be forced to vacate either at gunpoint or due to collective starvation. That can only be described one way, says Marc: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Think that's way off-base? Consider, for a moment, who Trump has in his corner. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has been touting Gaza as "waterfront property" for at least a year. And Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy to the region, is literally a billionaire New York real estate tycoon. To him, "Gaza must seem a unique opportunity: Beachfront property of uncertain legal ownership, with a wildly supportive neighbor and in obvious need of reconstruction," Marc writes. Swaths of US officials on both sides of the aisle are in disbelief over Trump's brazenness, yet nobody seems capable of stopping him. The perceptible adult in the room — one Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff — has yet to make any headway. "Washington, so desperate for a normal figure in these abnormal times, has propped Wiles up as a kind of miracle worker, maintaining order like nobody else could," writes Nia-Malika Henderson. "But if the last two weeks have been order, what would chaos look like?" News is flying at such a rapid clip these days, it'd be easy to miss what Dave Lee says is "the essential nationalization of social media" under Trump. Think about it: The US has a president who owns a social media company — Truth Social — who is best friends with a billionaire who owns a different social media company — X. Meanwhile, they're both giving another social media company — TikTok — googly eyes. It doesn't take a genius to hear the ethical alarm bells popping off. Elon Musk is a "special government employee" with a White House email address, a desk in the Eisenhower building and a team of wunderkind sidekicks to do his bidding. In what world would someone with largely unfettered access to American data be able to run an independent social media network? Maybe Musk ought to be asking that in his next poll: As for Trump's eleventh-hour TikTok intervention prior to his inauguration, there's now a permanent feeling of ick on the app that users can't seem to shake, and for good reason: On Monday, the president suggested he could buy the whole thing with a new sovereign wealth fund. "These are tactics of authoritarian regimes, not democracies," said George Wang, staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Adding to the mess, there are the deep-state conspiracy theories that F.D. Flam says "helped propel people like Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to prominence with their promises to provide transparency and save us from these threats." And yet transparency is in short supply these days. Dave says a US government takeover of TikTok could amount to "a harrowing encroachment on the 'public square' of social media, one that would chill the speech of those who would otherwise use the platform to dissent against what they see happening in America today." | 
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