Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman greets President Donald Trump
For generations, American foreign policy in the Middle East has been crafted with willful ignorance by people who see the region through the lens of Israel and oil. From the CIA coup in Iran in the 1950s to Cheney and Rumsfeld’s Iraq war folly – arguably the event that destabilized the entire planet by creating tens of millions of refugees, leading to rising fascism in Europe and the U.S – our history in the region is one of murder, mayhem, fecklessness and greed. Major and deadly decisions are routinely made without any appreciation of the history or understanding of the many, heterogeneous communities that live there. Ay-rabs, Eye-rack. In the 1990s, a purge of the “Arabists” in the State Department was even underway. It took 9/11 for the DOD and State to bring back a few Arabic speakers.
However, in the last few weeks, it’s started to become clear that the U.S. is taking a strange new tack.
During Trump One, the grift was mostly on in Ukraine and Russia. Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Rudy Giuliani reeking of duty-free cologne in first-class seats out of Eastern European airports, hauling suitcases of oligarchy pelf. Now, Trump Two has located far greater pots of gold. The Mother of all Piles, the trillions of dollars controlled by a tiny clan of Gulf oil potentates – wealth, which, it must be said, our gas addiction created.
Ever since Mohammed bin Salman, the millennial de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had his henchmen chop off a Washington Post writer’s fingers and then murder him within earshot of Turkish audio surveillance, it has been clear that the men who control trillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds can do whatever the hell they want to any man, woman, child, or beast on planet Earth.
This week, Trump is being feted by that very finger chopper. He is very much in his element, sipping Diet Cokes under “tank size chandeliers” and parking himself on gilded chairs to talk business with the leaders of the three major Gulf oil fiefdoms. In Trump Twos’s pay-to-play, even Israel is out in the cold. Miriam Adelson’s $100 million campaign donation, reportedly handed over to make sure Trump would not object to Israel seizing the West Bank? Sorry, chump change! Trump blew past Jerusalem on his way to sword dances with the sheiks -- causing intense but veiled terror among the Israeli leaders accustomed to carte blanche in the halls of American power.
In the last few weeks, Don Junior has been on a business tour around Europe, and Eric has also preened around the Middle East. The boys are riding on the U.S. Presidency, raking in tens of millions for the family business with hotel projects and condos in Dubai, Jeddah, and Qatar, where one project’s motto is “Challenge Everything Stop at Nothing.” The bros are not the first presidential relatives to cash in on Dad’s position, but they are the first to openly rake in money that directly benefits the Man in the White House.
Besides the projects, they are road-testing Dad’s meme coin and the family crypto bank, World Liberty Financial. WLF, created just weeks before the election, is an untraceable intake valve for influence buying. And WLF is now humming away, having reportedly sucked in $2 billion from the emirs of Abu Dhabi and the crypto firm Binance, which has been linked to money laundering for terrorism and sex traffickers. Few MAGAs understand what WLF does, and neither do most elected officials, who have been asleep at the wheel while the now even less regulated crypto industry runs amok.
The speed with which the Trump family is enriching itself in Trump Two is dizzying. At this point, metaphors, like satire, are increasingly out of reach for your poor Freakshow scribe. A swarming of termites, hogs at the trough, Coney Island hot dog eating contest? “Virtually every detail of Mr. Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest,” wrote the New York Times reporter dispatched to cover Zach Witkoff’s and Eric Trump’s press conference in Dubai. “There’s nothing like it,” said Douglas Brinkley, historian and author of books about U.S. presidents, of the Trump Two family financial windfalls.
And that was before the Qatari royal family offered Trump a Boeing 747-8 refitted as a flying palace, a gift that, according to the President, only a “stupid” person would turn down. In the Middle East, gifting is a common form of corruption known as baksheesh. Most U.S. ethics experts consider it illegal.
The gilded plane, though, seems to have woke the gag reflex of some leading MAGAs: Ben Shapiro, Loomer, and a few Republican Senators are making disgusted noises, and the commentariat from
Jennifer Rubin to Rick Wilson predicts that this gift could be the grift that breaks the camel’s back. But will it?Could it be that a nearly half-billion dollar offering from an Arab potentate is what it takes to cure the so-far incurable Obama Derangement Syndrome, the racist Brown people are coming to get my stuff mind-virus behind the MAGA fever that turns Trump into a hallucination of white Jesus? There seems to be something about the plane, more than the crypto grift and Trump sons raking it in under their dad’s name, that might even get some action from a third branch of government in Washington.
But, so far, no hint of outrage ruffles the alabaster brow of the nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Pam Bondi. In Trumpworld, there’s no PR stain that a blonde with a conspicuous crucifix can’t wash away.
Pam was a Tallahassee nobody when she first tangled with Trump, taking a $25,000 donation that she personally solicited in 2013 and then backing off a Trump University civil fraud case her office had filed.
Bondi went on to bigger fry. Besides representing Trump in his first impeachment, and eventually parroting the election Big Lie repeatedly in the media, she signed on as a lobbyist for Qatar with the Trump-connected Ballard firm, pulling down $115,000 a month. That job was public knowledge months ago, but it didn’t bother Republican Senators as they rubber stamped her along with one after another of the wackos, conspiracy theorists, and extremist flotsam and jetsam Trump nominated in nose-thumbing gestures to his civil society enemies. Now, though, it’s treated like big news. Hmmm…
Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.
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