Trump: “How much will Saudi Arabia pay us to save them?”
By: Mary Baker
Tags: Oil, Khashoggi, Trump, Iran, Saudi Arabia

Trump: “How much will Saudi Arabia pay us to save them?”

For Trump, it’s only about the money.

During a long interview with Bill O’Reilly in early January 2016–10 months before the election — then-presidential candidate Donald Trump asked, “How much will Saudi Arabia pay us to save them?”

The question was asked in Trump’s usual petulant context that the US spends billions to “protect” other countries and receives nothing in return. He refused to believe, then as he does now, that the US has its own vital interests abroad, and that having military and air bases abroad has significant benefits for the US.

Trump’s casino “protection racket” mindset

Trump has made no secret that he would extract money from Saudi Arabia, given the leverage and given the chance. Posts from 2014 illustrate his willingness to employ casino thug “protection” tactics.

Trump is ready to attack Iran, not based on evidence, but based on “terms” with Saudi Arabia

Trump’s avaricious greed became apparent again today when he notified the world, on Twitter, that the US was “locked and loaded” to attack Iran, and only awaiting “terms” from Saudi Arabia.

Even though it was widely and internationally reported that Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for its coordinated drone attacks against Saudi oil refineries, and even though Yemen had been conducting drone attacks over Saudi Arabia for weeks, President Trump chose to tweet that the US was “locked and loaded” with the heavy implication that he was ready to attack Iran if anyone so much as sneezed.

“How much will Saudi Arabia pay us?”

Just days before Trump made his avaricious comment to Bill O’Reilly in 2016, Saudi Arabia beheaded 47 Shiite and Sunni protestors and activists who had spoken out against the Saudi monarchy. Among those executed was Shia Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, who had called for peaceful pro-democracy protests and open elections.

Sheikh Nimr had called for protestors to resist police bullets using “the roar of the word” rather than violence. He was a critic of Syria’s brutal leader, Bashar Assad, as well as a critic of the Saudi monarchy. After his arrest, he engaged in a hunger strike, but was also beaten and tortured while jailed. The government refused to release Nimr’s body to his family, and later attacked and murdered several family members on their rural family farm.

Trump had every opportunity at the time to call on the Saudi monarchy to toe the line on human rights and to provide democratic leadership, as part of its “payment” for US protection. He did not — a pattern he has continued throughout his presidency.

Trump’s pattern of embracing human rights abusers

In April 2017 he welcomed Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, a regime leader who has locked up tens of thousands of dissidents, reporters and critics. Trump welcomed him as “someone who has been very close to me”. The same month, he issued a White House invitation to Rodrigo Duterte, the crazy-ass mass-murdering president of the Phillipines. Trump said they had a “very friendly conversation.”

In the same month, Trump called President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to congratulate him on winning a referendum that consolidated his autocratic rule over Turkey. Erdoğan had fired and abused academics and thousands of judges and other public officials. During a visit to the White House earlier that year, Erdoğan’s private security agents attacked American protestors outside the Turkish embassy in Washington DC — without a peep of protest from the Trump White House.

Trump’s formal White House statement on the Khashoggi murder reads like an ungraded middle school paper

Even more recently, the kidnap, murder, and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian dissident, shocked the nation and the world.

The White House’s formal response to the incident — which is still up on the White House website today — begins with two words: “America First!”

The title of the statement does not refer to Khashoggi’s murder at all. In fact, it clearly says, “Standing with Saudi Arabia”.

The White House press response immediately launches sideways into a disjointed diatribe against Iran, Lebanon, and Syria. But mainly Iran. How evil they are, and potentially how innocent — or at the very least, beleaguered — poor little Saudi Arabia is.

The press release uses the first person (“I/me/my”) so even without the clear title supporting the monarchy, it is very apparent that this formal statement, which is peppered with poor grammar, exclamation points and capitalized catchphrases, was dictated in its entirety by the president himself.

Trump accepts the Saudi claim that Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” even though Khashoggi was a well-known, outspoken and peaceful dissident.

Which brings us back to terms …

Saudi Arabia has stepped up its mass executions of dissidents, totaling 134 in first half of 2019, including 37 political activists killed en masse on April 23rd, according to a report by Scottish human rights barrister Baroness Helena Kennedy.

Meanwhile, the Saudi monarchy is desperate to squelch coverage of the Khashoggi killing before the 2020 US election. To that end, members of Khashoggi’s family still living in Saudi Arabia have been offered $10,000 a month and million-dollar homes.

Donald Trump has the leverage to demand that the Saudi monarchy stop executing and assassinating dissidents. An international community stands ready to support Trump if he were to demand open and democratic elections in Saudi Arabia.

But none of that matters to Trump. He just wants to know how much money he can get his hands on.