Trump is fuelling lethal fantasies of driving people from their land

The shock and awe continues and it only gets more shocking and more awful.

- Jonathan Freedland

These past few days, Americans have watched an unelected tech billionaire destroy large chunks of the federal government - Elon Musk bragged that he was feeding the life-saving USAid international development agency "into the wood chipper" - and yet that was not even the most outrageous event of last week.

That honour went instead to Donald Trump and his proposal to "just clean out" the Gaza Strip, by removing its people, bulldozing it and then redeveloping it as "the Riviera of the Middle East" under US ownership.

Initial reaction inside the US confirms how the US political classes, and what passes for the opposition, have been left numbed by the speed of events since 20 January and how far Trump has widened what was once referred to as the Overton window. He's not just opened that window, but smashed the glass, knocked out the frame and taken out the wall that used to hold it.

So domestic criticism of Trump's Gaza plan focused largely on his suggestion that US troops be deployed on the ground in Gaza to enforce US ownership. Bad idea, said the Democrats and Republican senator Lindsey Graham: that would put Americans in harm's way, recalling the 241 US marines sent to Beirut by Ronald Reagan, only to be killed in 1983 by a Hezbollah bomb.

Rahm Emanuel, who served as Barack Obama's White House chief of staff, told me that to have the US seize Gaza would be to repeat both the Beirut calamity and the "hubris" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, "the worst foreign policy mistake ever in United States history". Indeed, it would be "Iraq and Lebanon on steroids". Trump was meant to pull Americans out of Middle East wars, not plunge them into the oldest and bitterest of them all.