As evidence piles up pointing to the Saudi crown prince’s responsibility in the brutal killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump has only hardened his refusal to concede any possibility that the prince had a hand in the crime.
Mr. Trump, who had once condemned the Saudi leaders for perpetrating “the worst cover-up in history,” praised Saudi Arabia this weekend as a “truly spectacular ally,” even after the C.I.A. concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader, ordered the murder.
Mr. Trump said he would wait for a report on Mr. Khashoggi’s death produced by his administration, due Tuesday, before deciding how to assign blame. But he seemed to play down the importance of the report even before it was issued, suggesting that it would not establish definitively who was ultimately responsible and risking a clash with his own intelligence agencies.
“Will anybody really know?” Mr. Trump said in an interview aired on “Fox News Sunday.” “All right, will anybody really know?”https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/us/politics/trump-khashoggi-saudis.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=HomepageI have many thoughts on this, all not generous to Mr. Trump's indifference to the brutal murder of a journalist taking refuge in the US, and working for an American newspaper.
But it says something about the potential of corruption...
The Saudi's are known palm-greasers. They have used their money to gain influence, legal and otherwise, all over the globe. Given that, and our knowledge that Trump's professional career banked on his taking advantage of the opportunities presented to him by palm-greasers, how can we be sure that his position on this matter (which is vital, btw, to maintaining our credibility on human rights globally) is not coming from his personally, directly or indirectly through his businesses, making millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia?
Of course we can't. We can say, in fact, that he probably is.
So what possible justification can Republicans have for a hands-off approach to monitoring Trump's connections to those businesses, and investigating where necessary?
Just as with Sexual Assault, ultimately the only possible explanation for the Republican position on this is that they don't care if the President of the United States is a grifter. So long as they are in on the con.