Washington Week with The Atlantic

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The important thing in moments like these is to pay attention to what those in power do, not what they say.

America is not actually going to occupy the Gaza Strip and turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East any time soon, nor is it going to go to war with Denmark over Greenland.

This week, however, the Trump administration launched an attempt to neuter both the Federal Election Commission and the National Archives, the nonpartisan repository of, among other things, official White House records, and began dismantling America's counterintelligence capabilities.

And it's tearing through federal bureaucracies at a remarkable clip.

We'll separate the signal from the noise tonight with Anne Applebaum, my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Eugene Daniels is the Chief Playbook and White House Correspondent at Politico.

Asma Khalid is a White House Correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News.

And Michael Scherer is a recent addition to The Atlantic's team of White House Correspondents.

Welcome, Michael.

MICHAEL SCHERER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Thank you, Jeff.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You're welcome.

I'm glad to have you, glad to see you at the table.

So, look, I don't want to spend a great deal of time on it, but let me start with Gaza, if I may.

This is what a bit of what Donald Trump said the other day about Gaza.

Let's just listen.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal, and I don't want to be cute.

I don't want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so -- this could be so magnificent.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, I want to make sure that I'm not wrong.

American troops, Asma, are never going to go to Gaza and move all the people out so that they can build luxury high rises.

Is that fair?

ASMA KHALID, White House Correspondent, NPR: The president affirmed this week.

He did say that he has no intention of sending us troops to Gaza.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: How is he going to build the luxury high rises?

ASMA KHALID: In his view, Israel will hand over Gaza and the United States would be involved, I guess, in some sort of real estate situation.

But, look, I mean, you have to deal with the fact that there are, what, 1.5, 2 million Palestinians living there right now.

There's no sense of where they will go.

It's, you know, you could argue very unethical, immoral to move people.

But also it's not legal for the United States to occupy another country, another sovereign territory.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Even if you're building luxury high rises?

But the other part that I don't understand, and the administration hasn't talked about this, there's still Hamas, which is an Islamist militant organization that obviously invaded Israel a year-and-a-half ago, almost, and set off this latest conflagration that led to all the destruction in Gaza.

So, there's no thought about how do you convince the thousands of armed men of Hamas?

ASMA KHALID: They haven't explained any of that, no.

I mean, this is President Trump, a real estate man, who enlisted his Middle East envoy, also a real estate man, to go about, create some sort of real estate vision that he has for this region.

But, no, there's a lot of unanswered questions about what this would actually mean.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Can I ask all the White House correspondents at the table?

When you follow up privately or publicly, but mainly privately with administration officials and say, so what are you going to do about Hamas, how does this administration handle your questions?

EUGENE DANIELS, White House Correspondent, POLITICO: I mean, they usually say we have nothing to add to what the president said, right?

Like that's usually what we get.

I had a similar situation with that today and yesterday where I asked for a little bit more information on what he was saying.

Today, he said he hadn't talked to Zelenskyz, and he wasn't talking to him next week.

And so we were basically asking, wait, does he mean he's not meeting with him or he's not speaking with Zelenskyy again?

And they said, we don't have anything to add.

And what that tells us is that they don't know either, right.

And then they hope to, you hope to, it goes up the chain and comes back down, but sometimes it doesn't because things move so fast, right?

Like the Gaza thing happened earlier this week and the White House hasn't talked about it.

MICHAEL SCHERER: There is a functioning process in the White House and this White House is actually better than it was in 2017 that follows a normal course.

Like everyone looks at what the piece of paper is going to say.

The piece of paper says it.

Then there's this different category of things that the president just does.

And they are not -- I mean, coming out of the campaign, Susie Wiles learned very well.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The chief of staff.

MICHAEL SCHERER: The chief of staff.

There's something -- you don't have to get in the way of that moving train and stop it you just let things happen and then you deal with it afterwards And I think this is one of those situations.

Practically, like you said, Gaza is not going to be a Riviera, but from what he has done, which is a huge win for a certain section of the Israeli government, is turn American policy from two-state solution, which has always been the policy, you know, for, whatever, 30 years now to, oh, well, maybe there won't be Palestinians in Gaza in the future.

And I think what that has done -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So shifts the Overton window of the discussion.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Shift the window, the whole discussion.

And it has empowered a section of the Israeli government that was frowned upon by the American government.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, Anne, let me ask you this.

What's the harm -- okay, so there's never been a solution to Gaza, Egyptian occupation, Israeli endless occupation, turning it over to the Palestinian Authority, they lose it to Hamas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

What's the harm of Donald Trump going out there and floating seemingly random idea that at least gets a discussion going?

ANNE APPLEBAUM, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So, there's no harm in getting the discussion going, and there's no harm in looking for alternatives, and that's what presidents and prime ministers and diplomats should be doing.

But I don't think that's quite what Trump is doing.

You know, a lot of what he does, and this is very hard, especially for foreigners to understand, is just performance.

You know, it's got a Dada-esque quality.

You know, it's let's just say a thing that I came into my head, or let's -- you know, let me riff on something somebody just said to me, and then let's see what happens.

I mean, he did that with Greenland as well.

It was almost exactly the same process.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

I mean, Asma, when you -- I mean, you've been in the White House all week.

It seemed as if the Israeli prime minister was also kind of new to this information when he was standing there at the press conference.

ASMA KHALID: He made some facial expressions.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, he was kind of just trying to absorb it in real time, which is not normal.

ASMA KHALID: Yes.

I mean, I do think, as you said, Michael, it does shift the realm of possibility that Israeli society perhaps wants, and certainly Netanyahu would also want.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, he likes this conversation.

ASMA KHALID: But I would say, you know, I think that the big question here, and the question that nobody has really dealt with, I think, or even heard that much from, is, again, there are, you know, 1.5, 2 million, say, Palestinians living here.

To me, the conversation's really different, even if it's just tactical, from Greenland, because there are people living on a land that you would, ultimately, he is suggesting, have to move somewhere.

He hasn't said how that would happen, if this would be done through force, or how it could sort of -- how he could entice them from moving.

And I would say that this is a -- I mean, what he is proposing is It's to me just completely, I would argue, immoral.

It's not something that happens.

It's illegal.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You can't just do that.

You can't shift populations.

ASMA KHALID: You can't do this.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: It's against international law.

It would be de facto ethnic cleansing.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But let me just -- I'll put a pin on this for later, but, Asma, is there any chance that something real happens out of this, or is this going to be like the Denmark, Greenland -- ASMA KHALID: I mean, I think the challenge with covering Trump is, I think, that things that seem out of the realm of possibility, seem completely implausible.

There are elements of it that actually end up happening, right?

And I think we're already seeing this in just the first two weeks of his presidency.

ASMA KHALID: Oh, gosh, all sorts of things.

I mean, I did a story, for example, on Schedule F, which was something that he put in place.

This was around civil servants and ensuring that the civil service batch, you know, employees of the federal government would be more loyal to the president, easier to fire, right, traditional civil service workers.

I did a story about how the Biden administration had set up a rule to try to make this much more difficult to do.

Lo and behold, he comes in and he found another way, many ways, I would argue, to politicize the federal workforce, to decimate the federal workforce.

And so when I look at Trump, I think there are ideas that he is able to construe that are outside of the realm of normal people's imagination to ultimately get to goals that he wants.

EUGENE DANIELS: Because he's just -- it's just about testing the boundaries, right?

Like it is the same thing with renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, right?

ASMA KHALID: It happened.

EUGENE DANIELS: Everyone said that, oh, that's crazy, he's not going to do that.

And then you started seeing actual maps, people that do the maps on our phone say, we're changing the name to the Gulf of America, right?

And so that changes the output, you know, Gaza in that same category, where is the thing that he said exactly going to happen or is that is it changing the conversation?

Is it -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But to be fair, changing the name -- you could call Gaza Palm Beach East and leave everybody there.

I'm sure he can get the map changed, but this is -- you're talking about moving 2 million people is not in the -- I'm just noting that this is in the realm of the thoroughly -- ASMA KHALID: I don't think it's in the realm of possibility But I think there are so many things that Trump has done, I would say, just in the past two weeks, but even in the four years prior that seemed out of the realm of possibility, and he weirdly what moves the -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, let's go to -- let me go to Palm Beach Extremely East, I guess that would be like 6,000 miles east.

Let me go to something that actually is happening, which is that USAID