Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) exposed his perfidy and Trump’s cupidity with the brutal assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The prevailing feature of President Trump’s foreign policy is the way he courts world leaders with whom he has, or is scheming to establish, personal financial ties. Nothing betrayed this quite like the way he salivated at the prospect of striking deals with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Trump made a spectacle of the US presidency by gushing about how North Korea’s “great beaches” would make perfect locations for condos and hotels.

Trump’s Shameful Defense of a Brutal Murder

According to Haaretz, Turkish officials have a recording of the assassination at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on October 2nd, which Khashoggi captured on his Apple Watch. He went in to get documents to marry his Turkish fiancée, while she waited outside. Tragically, he never came out.

No doubt, Kashoggi’s murder is disheartening. But even more so is the venal, gaslighting way Trump provided political cover for MbS, the man who ordered it. Trump threatened “severe punishment” if the Saudis were responsible. But in the same breath, he floated an absurd “rogue killers” theory to shield MbS from blame.

According to reliable reports, MbS dispatched a 15-man hit squad to silence Khashoggi’s criticisms “for good.” They bone-sawed him into small parts, presumably for transport in diplomatic pouches back to Saudi Arabia. And yes, the parallel to the 15 Saudis who executed 9/11 cannot be ignored is uncanny, especially given Saudi denials and conspiracy theories about both atrocities.

Trump’s intelligence services informed him within days that this was an intentional Saudi hit job. Yet, just as he willfully defied briefings to propagate Putin’s denials about election interference, Trump parroted MbS’s equally fatuous denials about this murder.

Financial corruption drives Saudi appeasement

Trump’s mercenary motivation for letting the Saudi tail wag the American dog is crystal clear:

Saudi Arabia — and I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me … $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.

Despite Trump’s deceptive claims of no Saudi financial ties, Saudis may be more invested in his real estate holdings than even he is. Hell, he might be so beholden to them that the Trump Organization could be little more than a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Meanwhile, this artful dodger’s refusal to release tax returns keeps Americans in the dark about the full extent of this corruption.

Of course, most US businessmen withdrew from Saudi investment conferences like rats jumping off a sinking ship. But Trump stayed “constructively engaged,” aping the same shameful approach Reagan took with South Africa’s Apartheid regime.

European leaders filled the leadership void that Trump’s corruption created, leaving America to lead from behind in this, as it’s doing in so many other cases (e.g., re trade, climate change, and human rights).

MbS: A Pattern of Authoritarian Brutality

Lest anyone think this was MbS’s single transgression, consider his record of authoritarian brutality:

Dismissing corruption allegations by quipping, “I’m not Gandhi or Mandela”
Holding Lebanon’s prime minister hostage for weeks
Summarily convicting hundreds at the Ritz Carlton on trumped-up charges, extorting billions for their release
Launching a catastrophic war in Yemen that makes Bush’s Iraq invasion look restrained
Leading a hypocritical embargo against Qatar to silence Al Jazeera
Ordering Saudis to boycott Canada for criticizing women’s rights arrests

The real issue isn’t whether Trump will whitewash this Saudi dictator’s misdeeds; he’s already doing that with Putin, Erdogan, and Duterte. The question is whether Republican enablers will back their outrage with action: imposing severe sanctions and joining Democrats to impeach Trump.

They should act as a categorical imperative to show America still champions democratic values, despite Trump’s determination to sell them out for arms deals worth billions.

I cannot stress enough that having this irredeemable creep as president says more about the people who voted for him than about Trump himself. His racism, bullying, misogyny, mendacity, sexual predation, shady dealings, and political amorality were on continual display during his campaign.

I fully expect Trump to limit any “punishment” to token sanctions against sacrificial “rogue killers” that MbS happily offers up. The shameful truth is that Turkey’s Erdogan, hardly a press freedom champion himself, may be using intelligence about this murder to extort concessions rather than seek justice.

As I noted in my previous assessment of Saudi reforms, I once wished MbS well for his modernization potential. But ordering this hit on Khashoggi in Istanbul smacks of flying too close to the sun. Far from wishing him well, I now wish MbS gets burned.

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