Trump Gaza Is Finally Here

No more tunnels, no more fear! Trump Gaza is finally here! Or so goes the new song that just dropped via the president's Truth Social account.

JUST IN: President Trump shares a video of an AI vision for the Gaza Strip, ends with Trump having drinks at a pool with Benjamin Netanyahu.

The video also features bearded men in bikini tops.

Nothing could have prepared me for this. pic.twitter.com/1tO19aFN2t

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 26, 2025

Like so much of what Donald Trump does, it's untoward, unserious, and unfortunately catchy: An A.I.-generated video (with bearded belly-dancing women? and shirtless Benjamin Netanyahu?) riffing on Trump's comments earlier this month on how he wants to move Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, temporarily, to turn the Strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East" (replete with Trump hotels). "Donald's coming to set you free," the song goes. "Trump Gaza shining bright. Golden future, a brand-new light." Trump-style diplomacy remains a very mixed bag: an interest in extricating the U.S. from conflicts and funding commitments abroad paired with an interest in…involuntarily resettling the Palestinians to develop casinos on top of rubble and negotiating an end to the Russia-Ukraine war without Ukraine present. As usual, sorting out what Trump is serious about vs. what he's just messing around about is very hard to do. His Overton window–expanding abilities remain impressive, though.

House spending bill: In much more serious news, the House just passed a budget resolution that calls for $4.5 trillion worth of tax cuts and $2 trillion worth of reduced federal spending over the next decade; it's not clear how exactly they'll do this or which programs they'll have to slash to make it happen. The budget resolution also called for increasing the debt limit by $4 trillion.

"We promised to deliver President Trump's full agenda, not just a part of it," said Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.). "We're not just going to do a little bit now and return later for the rest. We have to do it now." But it's not totally clear what he means or how this will work: Trump doesn't appear interested in cutting entitlements, which will be necessary to make as large of a spending dent as advertised. And Trump remains committed to intense enforcement at the border, for example, even if his defense secretary is working to trim the Pentagon budget. (The bill calls for an increase in funding, to the tune of $300 billion, for the border.)

"Republican tax writers have been agonizing over what they can squeeze into the bill," reports The New York Times. "Much of the tax revenue will be consumed by simply continuing the tax policies that Republicans put into place in 2017, which expire at the end of the year. Extending the 2017 tax law will cost roughly $4 trillion over a decade, while several other desperately desired business tax breaks will eat up another couple of hundred billion. That leaves only a sliver of the budget for the potpourri of other tax cuts that Republicans hope to cram into the legislation, including not taxing tips and lifting the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction."

Is the DOGEmaster actually a dunce? Critics of both actions and aesthetics of Elon Musk, the head honcho at the Department of Government Efficiency—and SpaceX, X, Tesla, and The Boring Company—like to claim he's a stupid edgelord troll. There's plenty of evidence to indicate he has 10-year-old boy sensibilities: The shitposting, the memes, the misspelling of basic things (like Genghis Khan's name), the sharing of LibsofTikTok content. But denigrating Musk's intelligence and capabilities (as with Trump's) has always rubbed me the wrong way; it seems overly simplistic, like there might be something we're not seeing.

"Part of the reason some progressives still insist on sneering at Elon's intellect is the traditional class resentment of the shabby educated elite for the wealthy titans of industry," argues Noah Smith at Noahpinion. "But I think a lot more of it is simply what the kids call 'cope.' Right now, Elon is applying all of the same talents he used to build his companies—motivating employees, circumventing red tape, identifying and overwhelming every bottleneck at breakneck speed—to his effort to remake the U.S. civil service with DOGE. Telling themselves that Elon doesn't really have any talent, or that he just gets lucky, or that he's just a huckster, or that he only succeeds because of government help, are ways that progressives comfort themselves with the belief that Elon's efforts will inevitably fail."

Nate Silver calls it "spiky intelligence" and says "it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people" like this: "That Elon is highly intelligent in several ways does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous—and we shouldn't make excuses for these or pretend that it's all part of some master plan." And also: "It's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just because he isn't in others. And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care; he's demonstrated his intelligence through his accomplishments."

Silver breaks down evidence of Musk's intelligence into a few categories: "cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower"; "rapid cognition and thin-slicing ability"; "abstract problem-solving ability"; and "instrumental rationality" ("aligning means with ends" or—put more simply—"shrewdness").

Government employees seemingly struggle with basic DOGE assignment: Alina Habba, counselor to the president, held a press conference yesterday about DOGE and federal government employees' seeming inability to respond to the notorious five-bullet-point job-justification email: "It's just such a nonissue. Think about the fact that we're having—look at all of you, standing here, asking me why people are upset to answer to their boss, the American people, and the president of the United States, what you've done at work! What a ridiculous thing!"

All of this—the Trump Gaza video, the seeming math issue that will present itself when grappling with the new spending bill, the debate over Musk's intellect, the utter insanity of federal employees melting down over basic things that are expected in any other industry, the haphazard way the DOGE audit has been done (and the union lawsuits that have ensued)—might seem disjointed, but it's really not: We're in an era where the federal government—both the people who run it at a high level and the career bureaucrats who call themselves civil servants—are at a fork in the road in terms of whether they'll choose seriousness (like making hard cuts to get the national debt under control, which would improve American competitiveness) or a trolling, time-wasting race to the bottom.

Scenes from New York: The Love Gov may be back for more.

QUICK HITS

• Find it semifunny that The Atlantic profiled the lovely Aella (whom I dined with recently in Miami and have interviewed a few times for Reason). "Over the course of 2024, Aella cried on 71 different days, showered on 24, and took ketamine on 14. We know this because she meticulously gathers and posts information about people's personal, emotional, and sexual lives—including her own. The crying number was unusually high, she says, because of a bad breakup. For many fans, the more boggling statistic was that last year, she had sex on only 41 days, but on one of those days, she had sex with nearly 40 people. We'll come back to that." I truly did not expect word of Aella's, uh, antics to reach The Atlantic of all places.
• This prompt, from Bridget Phetasy, is incredible ("What are your most insane, frustrating, or infuriating stories of dealing with any government agencies or services?"). The responses are truly next-level.

I have two.

Back in 2015, I paid off my student loans…or thought I did. The last check was for $.85 or something like that. Two months later, I started getting threatening calls from a debt collector, and then my credit tanked because I was "more than 180 days late" on my… https://t.co/oBQE5mXxsD

— Emily Zanotti ???? (@emzanotti) February 25, 2025

• Predictable:

New w/Dartmouth students: State media tagging does not affect perceived tweet accuracy

Key findings:
-no evidence tags changed perceived accuracy
-users seemed to mostly not notice
-might be ineffective or worse for those who view state media favorablyhttps://t.co/BT9HANJO26 pic.twitter.com/XCR8GMuzcB

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on ????) (@BrendanNyhan) February 25, 2025

• I'm persuaded:

What if lord of the rings is actually a science fiction novel set a million years in the future in a de industrialized society after an extended dark age, amongst various genetically modified organisms that have lost their history ?

— ???????????????????????? (@Grimezsz) February 26, 2025

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