The Palestrump Resort and 1800-Hole Golf Course

The Column: 02.10.25

I sympathized with our President’s proposing that we run all the Palestinians out of Gaza and take ownership and turn it into a luxury resort. I’ve had crazy ideas myself but thank goodness I’ve kept them to myself. I do think a neurologist should be brought in — this sounds like global amnesia to me. Golf can be a dangerous game and you wonder if he might’ve taken a hit. The press doesn’t cover his rounds closely.

So of course everyone in the world denounced the idea, and poor Karoline Leavitt had to stand up in the White House press room and say he hadn’t meant what he said. And then, walking through a crowd of reporters shouting questions at him, the man himself did not stop to respond.

The look on his face struck me as one of confusion. He is 78, after all, and it is a stressful job, even if you do have Elon Musk, the World’s Richest Man, running the shop. At this age (I am 82) it’s not easy to maintain the air of belligerence and manly vengeance that the MAGA folks expect of him. After an hour or two of the jutting jaw and the narrowed eyes, a man feels like telling a joke.

DJT’s last joke was in 2019 when he threatened to sue Wharton School, Fordham, Penn, and his high school if any of them made his academic record public. The joke was on him. The truth is that the electorate is suspicious of someone with top grades. George W. Bush knew that and acted like a bozo although his grades at Yale were better than John Kerry’s. Kerry spoke like a graduate student and Bush talked like a guy you’d go fishing with. He won.

Kamala Harris had the disadvantage of being the child of immigrants who pushed her to excel and to speak intelligently, as immigrant parents tend to do. DJT was born rich to parents who believed he was brilliant and perfect from the day he was set in the bassinet. Thanks to his charmed childhood, he has never, to the best of my knowledge, admitted a mistake or apologized for anything. This sets him apart from the hardworking lunch-bucket backache crowd that elected him. You and I live with a raft of regrets and he knows not one. This gives the man a golden glow.

In fact, the day after Karoline tried to walk him back from the U.S. occupation of Gaza, Don put his foot down, by God, reasserting his preposterous proposal and I assume that DOGE 20-year-olds are working on a plan for clearing the debris and putting in the hotels and the spa and Palace Tinian, giant crypts for cryptocurrency, and the World’s Largest Golf Course, with 3,600 sand traps created by the Israeli air force.

The man is in his own world, promising to end the war in Ukraine on Day One, and Day One comes and then Week Two and nothing need be said. Or he could say it was only a bargaining position. Or that he was promising to go to Fort Wayne on May One, and the American people, tumbling around in the backwash of texts and posts, bulletins, streaming idiocy, hardly notice. It’s just one more blip in the data blizzard.

This did not happen back when we looked each other in the eye and talked and were able to distinguish critical thinking from chicken manure. Dwight D. Eisenhower, my parents’ favorite president, did not bring in Henry Ford to help him efficiencize the federal government nor did he promise to end the war in Korea on Day One and then claim he meant he’d cure diarrhea in Ceylon. Odd as it is for an old draft dodger to place his faith in the military to save America, that’s exactly what I do. America means more to people who’ve put their lives at risk for it, just as Christmas means more if you’ve experienced poverty. I sense a dedication to duty and a strength of character in our uniformed men and women that is missing from Congress.

We’ve seen some notable men and woman sell their souls in broad daylight recently. God have mercy on them. There are simple tests for dementia, Melania. Time to step up and do what a wife should do.

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