When Donald Trump welcomed Imran Khan to the White House in 2019, the then-president of Pakistan expressed his frustration at volleys of aggressive questions from reporters outside the Oval Office.

The president, I was told by a well-connected source, had a ready answer, phrased something like this.

“Look, you’re doing it wrong,” he said to Mr Khan and his entourage. “Every day, I wake up and I tweet the craziest thing I can think of.

“The press run after that, and then I can get on and do what I actually want somewhere else”.

The anecdote – hearsay though it may be – came to mind this morning after Mr Trump’s eye-popping announcement that the US would occupy the Gaza Strip and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.