[Editors Note: We reprint here the December 21, 2025 CounterPunch article by Jeffrey St. Clair on the recent Washington, D.C. visit of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.]
“One might almost say that to live in society today is something like living inside an enormous comic strip.
― Jean-Luc Godard”
+ President Bone Spurs on Prince Bone Saws: “We have an extremely respected man in the Oval Office today. And a friend of mine for a long time. A very good friend of mine. I’m very proud of the job he’s done. What he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights.”
+ You might recall the manufactured furor that erupted in certain predictable precincts of the Right when, in 2009, Barack Obama appeared to bow (more of a curtsy, really, as was his style) before King Abdullah. Well, that questionable show of deference to Saudi royalty was totally eclipsed by Donald Trump’s grotesque and craven display of obeisance before Abdullah’s son, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.
MBS came to DC, wrapped in his Bedouin robes, looking to be received once again in civilized (if you can call Trump’s White House that) society, eight years after his elite hit squad killed and butchered the Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi.
MBS, who runs the kingdom with an iron fist, represents everything Trump fantasizes about enjoying himself: incalculable wealth, absolute power, impunity from even the most heinous of crimes and total loyalty, enforced at sword point.
So it’s no surprise that Trump did more than receive MBS with diplomatic niceties. He lavished praise on the smirking Prince with the eagerness if a supplicant, asserted his innocence with the fervency (if not articulateness) of a defense lawyer, throwing his own intelligence agencies under the bus, demeaned and ridiculed an American reporter for asking obvious and obligatory questions of the Prince and even went so far as to suggest that Khashoggi may have deserved to be killed on the orders of the man sitting across from him in the Oval Office. “Things happen,” Trump shrugged.
Rarely has an American president prostrated himself so abjectly and unreservedly in front of another world leader…at least in public. The Bushes–father and son–shared an inexplicable devotion to Prince Bandar, but they largely kept their unseemly acts of fealty to the oil kingdom behind the closed doors of the now demolished East Wing.
The deniability for MBS’s complicity in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi is entirely implausible, as both the CIA and the UN concluded. It was MBS’s personal praetorial guard, the so-called Tiger Team, that detained Khashoggi after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, interrogated him, tortured him, drugged him, killed him (likely by strangulation while wearing a hood) dismembered his body using a bone saw, and then either incinerated his body parts or dissolved them in acid and buried them on the consulate grounds beneath piles of barbecued meat.
+ MBS was the head of the Saudi security service that carried out the assassination. It’s inconceivable they would have carried out such an operation without his authority or knowledge.
+ MBS sent multiple texts before and after the killing to his top lieutenant, Saud al-Qahtani, who was supervising the hit squad and apparently gave the order to kill Khashoggi: “Bring me the head of the dog.”
+ The Tiger Team flew to and from Istanbul on the private jets of a company–Sky Prime Aviation–controlled by the Crown Prince.
+ The killers reportedly brought Khashoggi’s fingers back to Riyadh, as proof of the dissident’s death.
+ In 2018, Trump blocked the release of the CIA investigation into Khashoggi’s murder, which concluded with “high confidence” that MBS ordered Khashoggi’s assassination. The assessment reportedly included a recorded telephone call between MBS and his brother Khalid bin Salman, who then served as the Saudi ambassador to the US, where MBS allegedly ordered his brother “to silence Jamal Khashoggi as soon as possible”.
+ From the executive summary of the CIA report:
We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decision-making in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.
+ When the conclusion of the CIA report leaked out to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, Trump undercut his own intelligence agency, saying that the report was based only on “feelings” and that there was “no smoking gun.” Trump, in his customary manner, said of the Crown Prince, “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”
+ For his book Rage, Bob Woodward interviewed Trump about MBS and the killing of Jamal Khashoggi…
“I’ve gotten involved very much,” Trump said. “I know everything about the whole situation.”
“So what happened, sir? I asked.
“I saved his ass,” Trump said. “That’s what happened.”
Saved whose ass?
“MBS,” Trump said. “They were coming down on him very strongly. But I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop. . . You know, I’m very friendly with those guys.”
Which guys? The Saudis?
“Congress. I’m very friendly with Congress,” Trump said.
(Rage, p. 227; The Trump Tapes, p. 190)
+ Major Garrett: How did you feel when you saw Trump’s reaction to just one question about this today? How hostile he became, how defensive on behalf of the Crown Prince he became
Hanan Elatr Khashoggi: “It was a disappointment to silence the journalists. She’s doing her job. She’s being transparent and professional. I really wish Trump would listen to me, meet with me. I want to tell him who is the real Jamal Khashoggi…To say he’s controversial … it does not give anyone the right to just kidnap him, torture him, kill him and dismantle his body. This hurt me a lot. It’s taking away, as well, the freedom for the journalists to do their job. … And what is the difference then between the U.S. and any dictatorship in a Middle Eastern country? He admitted verbally, he took responsibility verbally, but he did not take any action to show the world there is rectifying of this crime.. I did not receive an official apology myself as a wife, as they destroyed my life. They’ve taken my lover.”
+ Of course, Trump is far from the only US leader to protect MBS. Obama coordinated with MBS in Saudi Arabia’s war on the Houthis in Yemen, where the death toll reached near genocidal proportions. Then, in November 2022, the Biden administration issued a written opinion attesting that MBS enjoyed diplomatic immunity for his role in Khashoggi’s murder and was therefore shielded from prosecution or civil actions in US courts. Biden, who once vowed to make MBS “a pariah,” later gave him a fist-bump when the two met in Jeddah in 2022.
+ At least 8 of Khashoggi’s killers received paramilitary training in the US.
+ Do Americans really need reminding that Osama bin Laden was a Saudi? Or that 15 of the 18 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals and the entire operation was largely financed by Saudi sources. A former Al Qaeda commander and head-chopper backed by the Saudis, who was just feted at the White House last week, is now running Syria…It’s becoming clearer and clearer who won the Forever Wars.
+++
+ As I’ve said several times, nothing unnerves Trump more than being confronted by an intelligent woman who shows no fear of his bullying manner. He quickly becomes unglued. Witness Trump’s absolutely demented attacks on ABC News White House Correspondent, Mary Bruce, for having the guts to ask two obvious questions of Trump and Bin Salman…One would hope that the press corps’ job is to ask “insubordinate” questions, though they rarely do. Let’s see if ABC stands by her.
ABC News reporter, Mary Bruce: “Is it appropriate for your family to do business with Saudi Arabia while you’re president? And to you, your royal highness, the US intelligence agencies concluded you orchestrated the murder of a journalist…”
Trump: “Who are you with?”
Bruce: “ABC News.”
Trump: “ABC Fake news. I have nothing to do with the family business. You mentioned somebody extremely controversial—a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman [Khashoggi]. Whether you did or didn’t like him, things happen, but he [MBS] knew nothing about it. You don’t have to embarrass our guest.”
Then a few minutes later…
Bruce: “Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files? Why not just do it now?”
Trump: “It’s not the question that I mind. It’s your attitude. I think you are a terrible reporter. It’s the way you ask these questions. You start off with a man who is highly respected, asking him about a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question. You could even ask that question nicely. But you’re all psyched. Somebody psyched you over at ABC. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter… You work for a crappy company. I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake. So wrong. We have a great commissioner, a chairman who should look at that.
+ When Catherine Lucey, an excellent reporter for Bloomberg News, asked Trump on Air Force One last week whether he thought there was anything incriminating in the Epstein files, he jabbed his finger toward her face and sneered, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy!”
+ WH press flackette Karoline Leavitt on why Trump called Lucey a “piggy”: “The president is very frank and honest with everyone in this room. You’ve seen it yourself. You’ve all experienced it yourselves. And I think it’s one of the many reasons that the American people re-elected this president, because of his frankness.”
+ The real question is why Lucey’s colleagues stayed quiet when Trump insulted her on Air Force One. Silly question, I know, given the sepulchral silence from the US press corps over the systematic slaughter of their Palestinian colleagues in Gaza.
+ Trump took to his social media account early Thursday morning, clearly in a state of psychological agitation: he called for leading Democrats, including several who are veterans, to be arrested for sedition and tried for treason; demanded once again that the “bum” Jimmy Kimmel be fired; posted a fake video of him kicking a soccer ball in the Oval Office with Cristiano Renaldo (who hadn’t visited the US in 11 years because of a sexual assault allegation stemming from 2009, that was ultimately dismissed by a court in 2023), reposting a call for Democrats to be hanged [It’s what George Washington would do]; then made his own call for the Democratic members of Congress to face the death penalty.
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