Can't let a little murder stand in the way of business, can we?
The killing of Jamal Khashoggi isn't even an afterthought on Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia
By Sam Bellamy
A previous engagement with a syringe and a bone saw prevented Jamal Khashoggi from attending Tuesday’s lunch gathering in Riyadh with President Trump, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and 30 or so U.S. business leaders. It’s unlikely he sent his regrets.
Bygones became bygones with this crowd long ago, despite Khashoggi’s murder in 2018 at a Saudi embassy in Turkey, where he’d gone to pick up papers for his upcoming wedding. MBS, as he’s known, denied involvement in the death of one of his most vocal critics, but the CIA and the United Nations both concluded the prince approved the slaying.
Jeff Bezos, who employed Khashoggi as a columnist at The Washington Post and was allegedly the target of phone hacking by MBS prior to the murder, apparently wasn’t at this week’s lunch. But Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, did belly up to the table in what the Associated Press described as “an ornate room with blue and gold accents and massive crystal chandeliers.”
MBS, clearly delighted to see his American guests, indulged them with world-class flattery and pomp, beginning with royal jets escorting Air Force One to Riyadh.
“The de facto Saudi leader greeted Trump warmly as he stepped off Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport,” the AP reported. “The two leaders then retreated to a grand hall at the Riyadh airport, where Trump and his aides were served traditional Arabic coffee by waiting attendants wearing ceremonial gun belts.”
Oooh, ceremonial gun belts – such a special day.
In the first few minutes of the video below, you can watch Trump bask in the applause on a stage through the entirety of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” (His subsequent speech is equally nauseating.)
Judd Legum and Noel Sims at Popular Information on Substack offer an excellent summary of the day’s festivities, along with an account of how many of the attendees were outraged – outraged! – by Khashoggi’s murder once upon a time but now apparently regard it as just one of those unfortunate things that happens sometimes. People have falling outs, you know?
Trump is in Riyadh on a tour of the Middle East to accept his luxury jumbo jet from Qatar and shore up his personal business relationships in various countries, all under the guise of drumming up investment in the United States and strengthening diplomatic ties. Perhaps some of the latter will get done, too, but we all know what Trump’s priority is.
Speaking of ties, Khashoggi was, as Legum and Sims recall in their piece, “forcibly restrained and injected with a fatal dose of a drug” on his visit to the Saudi embassy seven years ago. Afterward, he was dismembered with a bone saw.
Trump mildly rebuked MBS at the time but later maneuvered around Congress to sell the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates about $8 billion worth of weapons. “I saved his ass,” Trump later told Bob Woodward. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”
Like his oligarch traveling companions, Trump didn’t seem to have any regrets about how he responded to Khashoggi’s murder.
If anything, Trump is probably disappointed the guy didn’t live long enough to be snatched from the street and deported.
If nothing else, trump is gaudy. But, he's much more than that. At the risk of minimizing his awfulness, he's a criminal, racist, rapist, conman, traitor... but we all knew that.