President Trump Thread...
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BipolarFuk
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Saudi affair exposes Trumpism's moral apathy
Saudi affair exposes Trumpism's moral apathy
Donald Trump has dug a moral hole through the middle of America's foreign policy -- and he's not sorry at all.
The President's reaction to the apparent murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul offers the clearest evidence yet of his turn away from a foreign policy rooted in universal human values.
The crisis is instead showcasing Trump's radical form of "America First" realpolitik, his promise not to infringe other nations' sovereignty with lectures on human rights and his trust in the word of autocrats.
In his unrepentant conduct of American foreign policy, Trump is lurching from a path taken by every president since World War II, who all believed to various degrees that American leadership was needed to create a world safe for democracy, open commerce and freedom.
And it will be seen around the world as an unmistakable sign that there is no cost for heinous behavior -- after all, it happened days after a US-based journalist for a top American newspaper was apparently killed before his body was reportedly chopped up in an official Saudi government building.
Washington often failed to honor its values -- in the carpet bombing of Cambodia, for instance, or its support for Arab dictators. And many in the Middle East saw post-9/11 foreign policy as deeply hypocritical.
But for 70 years, the United States has been a beacon for dissidents in totalitarian nations, acting as a guarantor of democracy and peace in Europe and Northeast Asia. It waged a Cold War to defeat Communism, enhancing its claims of benevolent foreign policy leadership.
It is that legacy of moral clarity that the Trump administration is burning in the mystery over what happened to Khashoggi.
Three days ago, Trump was promising "severe" punishments for Saudi Arabia after the journalist vanished, in an episode that flouts every conventional American principle on how governments should treat their people.
But now, the President has shifted his tone and is abetting the kingdom's evolving narrative on Khashoggi's disappearance.
Jarring footage meanwhile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo beaming in photo-ops Tuesday alongside King Salman and ruthless son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, encapsulated a closing of ranks with Riyadh.
The President told The Associated Press that blaming Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi's disappearance was another case of "guilty until proven innocent," an echo of his rhetoric concerning the sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
It all looked like an administration more concerned with insulating its relationship with the Saudi royals, key players in its effort to squeeze Iran, than seeking answers about what happened to Khashoggi.
Buying the Saudi story
Pompeo's spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the secretary of state had thanked the King for ordering "a thorough, transparent and timely investigation" into Khashoggi's disappearance. While body language and official statements do not convey everything that goes on behind the scenes, Pompeo's demeanor hardly suggested a rebuke was delivered.
His trip only compounded impressions created by Trump, who gave credence to shifting Saudi denials of involvement and acted as a PR agent for the king, on Monday, relaying his comment that "rogue killers" were to blame.
On Tuesday, Trump, who sources told CNN was frustrated with news coverage about the Khashoggi episode, bought into an explanation offered by the crown prince, who many experts believe knew what was in store for Khashoggi if he did not order his elimination himself.
"Just spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who totally denied any knowledge of what took place in their Turkish Consulate," Trump tweeted. "Answers will be forthcoming shortly."
Three sources familiar with the case say the Saudi mission to interrogate and possibly abduct Khashoggi was organized by a high-ranking officer with the main Saudi intelligence service. It's unclear whether the crown prince authorized either contingency but CNN previously reported that the operation could not have happened without his direct knowledge.
Saudi response fits Trump's view of sovereignty
The President's handling of the Khashoggi case epitomizes the doctrine of individual national sovereignty he laid out at the UN General Assembly.
"Whatever those values may be and they have been in the past in terms of foreign policy, they are no longer important and he has made that very clear," said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, co-author of a study of Trump's foreign policy, "The Empty Throne," published on Tuesday.
"His basic view is what you do is your problem as long as you leave us alone," Daalder said, maintaining Trump was closer to China's worldview in this context than a traditional American one.
Trump has left little doubt that in his deal-driven ideology is designed to leverage financial wealth and will not be deflected by human rights concerns.
"We are not here to lecture -- we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship," Trump said during his first foreign trip -- to Saudi Arabia -- last year.
Then, in a revealing interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday, the President frankly said that he didn't want to sanction Saudi Arabia because it could cost firms like Boeing and Raytheon billions in arms deals and cost jobs.
In the same interview, he indicated that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's repression would not disrupt their relationship -- which he had previously compared to a love affair.
"Let it be an embrace. Let it be whatever it is to get the job done," Trump said.
And he hinted that as long as Russian President Vladimir Putin did not kill his opponents on US soil, he would look the other way.
"I rely on them. It's not in our country," he said.
While Trump cozies up to autocrats and strongmen like Putin, China's Xi Jinping, Kim, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and MBS, he has insulted leaders of American allies. He has called journalists "the enemy of the people."
Critics believe such rhetoric has offered license to repressive leaders in places like Turkey, Russia and the Philippines -- not to mention MBS, whose recklessness has turned into a political embarrassment for the US.
Mona Charen, a conservative commentator, said on CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper" that Trump had taken realism to extremes and that Khashoggi's case was so "flagrant" it cried out for US moral leadership.
"The world is full of bad actors and sometimes you have to deal with them and that is the world we live in. But what isn't acceptable is an attempt to whitewash what they are, an attempt to let them off the hook," she said.
Broken trust
Trump views criticism of his approach as the naive complaints of a political establishment that led America into nearly two decades of foreign wars and disdained the voters that put him in office in 2016.
He thinks the United States has been a soft touch, letting its values get in the way of maximizing its power while savvier nations have taken advantage while getting fat on its generosity -- see NATO.
Even in his own party, there are those who believe his abandonment of American core principles and global leadership is catastrophic.
"There isn't enough money in the world to purchase back our credibility on human rights and the way nations should conduct themselves," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, said in an interview on CNN's "New Day" on Tuesday.
What Trump does next will decide whether Washington is able to credibly criticize strongmen like Putin and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, he said.
"We can't say anything about that if we allow Saudi Arabia to do it and all we do is a diplomatic slap on the wrist," Rubio said.
A senior administration official told CNN's Barbara Starr that the decision on what to do with the Saudis may be the "the most consequential" of Trump's presidency, since it will dictate whether US military leaders and diplomats can maintain a moral high ground on human rights.
That's unlikely to change Trump's mind, since any rupture with the Saudis would endanger his effort to destabilize and pressure Iran.
He is relying on Saudi Arabia to release more oil onto the market to meet demand after pressuring allies to stop imports from Iran.
Riyadh, of course, has considerable influence on the state of the global economy and therefore Trump's own prospects of re-election with its power to engineer spikes in global oil prices.
In the longer term, foreign policy traditionalists worry about what Trump's ideological turn means for the American-led world order.
"The order in essence was based in trust. People had to trust the United States to ultimately do the right thing. You were willing to give it room to fail and to make mistakes but then to come back," Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO, said.
"He has fundamentally broken that trust."
Saudi affair exposes Trumpism's moral apathy
Donald Trump has dug a moral hole through the middle of America's foreign policy -- and he's not sorry at all.
The President's reaction to the apparent murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul offers the clearest evidence yet of his turn away from a foreign policy rooted in universal human values.
The crisis is instead showcasing Trump's radical form of "America First" realpolitik, his promise not to infringe other nations' sovereignty with lectures on human rights and his trust in the word of autocrats.
In his unrepentant conduct of American foreign policy, Trump is lurching from a path taken by every president since World War II, who all believed to various degrees that American leadership was needed to create a world safe for democracy, open commerce and freedom.
And it will be seen around the world as an unmistakable sign that there is no cost for heinous behavior -- after all, it happened days after a US-based journalist for a top American newspaper was apparently killed before his body was reportedly chopped up in an official Saudi government building.
Washington often failed to honor its values -- in the carpet bombing of Cambodia, for instance, or its support for Arab dictators. And many in the Middle East saw post-9/11 foreign policy as deeply hypocritical.
But for 70 years, the United States has been a beacon for dissidents in totalitarian nations, acting as a guarantor of democracy and peace in Europe and Northeast Asia. It waged a Cold War to defeat Communism, enhancing its claims of benevolent foreign policy leadership.
It is that legacy of moral clarity that the Trump administration is burning in the mystery over what happened to Khashoggi.
Three days ago, Trump was promising "severe" punishments for Saudi Arabia after the journalist vanished, in an episode that flouts every conventional American principle on how governments should treat their people.
But now, the President has shifted his tone and is abetting the kingdom's evolving narrative on Khashoggi's disappearance.
Jarring footage meanwhile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo beaming in photo-ops Tuesday alongside King Salman and ruthless son Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, encapsulated a closing of ranks with Riyadh.
The President told The Associated Press that blaming Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi's disappearance was another case of "guilty until proven innocent," an echo of his rhetoric concerning the sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
It all looked like an administration more concerned with insulating its relationship with the Saudi royals, key players in its effort to squeeze Iran, than seeking answers about what happened to Khashoggi.
Buying the Saudi story
Pompeo's spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the secretary of state had thanked the King for ordering "a thorough, transparent and timely investigation" into Khashoggi's disappearance. While body language and official statements do not convey everything that goes on behind the scenes, Pompeo's demeanor hardly suggested a rebuke was delivered.
His trip only compounded impressions created by Trump, who gave credence to shifting Saudi denials of involvement and acted as a PR agent for the king, on Monday, relaying his comment that "rogue killers" were to blame.
On Tuesday, Trump, who sources told CNN was frustrated with news coverage about the Khashoggi episode, bought into an explanation offered by the crown prince, who many experts believe knew what was in store for Khashoggi if he did not order his elimination himself.
"Just spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who totally denied any knowledge of what took place in their Turkish Consulate," Trump tweeted. "Answers will be forthcoming shortly."
Three sources familiar with the case say the Saudi mission to interrogate and possibly abduct Khashoggi was organized by a high-ranking officer with the main Saudi intelligence service. It's unclear whether the crown prince authorized either contingency but CNN previously reported that the operation could not have happened without his direct knowledge.
Saudi response fits Trump's view of sovereignty
The President's handling of the Khashoggi case epitomizes the doctrine of individual national sovereignty he laid out at the UN General Assembly.
"Whatever those values may be and they have been in the past in terms of foreign policy, they are no longer important and he has made that very clear," said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, co-author of a study of Trump's foreign policy, "The Empty Throne," published on Tuesday.
"His basic view is what you do is your problem as long as you leave us alone," Daalder said, maintaining Trump was closer to China's worldview in this context than a traditional American one.
Trump has left little doubt that in his deal-driven ideology is designed to leverage financial wealth and will not be deflected by human rights concerns.
"We are not here to lecture -- we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship," Trump said during his first foreign trip -- to Saudi Arabia -- last year.
Then, in a revealing interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday, the President frankly said that he didn't want to sanction Saudi Arabia because it could cost firms like Boeing and Raytheon billions in arms deals and cost jobs.
In the same interview, he indicated that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's repression would not disrupt their relationship -- which he had previously compared to a love affair.
"Let it be an embrace. Let it be whatever it is to get the job done," Trump said.
And he hinted that as long as Russian President Vladimir Putin did not kill his opponents on US soil, he would look the other way.
"I rely on them. It's not in our country," he said.
While Trump cozies up to autocrats and strongmen like Putin, China's Xi Jinping, Kim, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and MBS, he has insulted leaders of American allies. He has called journalists "the enemy of the people."
Critics believe such rhetoric has offered license to repressive leaders in places like Turkey, Russia and the Philippines -- not to mention MBS, whose recklessness has turned into a political embarrassment for the US.
Mona Charen, a conservative commentator, said on CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper" that Trump had taken realism to extremes and that Khashoggi's case was so "flagrant" it cried out for US moral leadership.
"The world is full of bad actors and sometimes you have to deal with them and that is the world we live in. But what isn't acceptable is an attempt to whitewash what they are, an attempt to let them off the hook," she said.
Broken trust
Trump views criticism of his approach as the naive complaints of a political establishment that led America into nearly two decades of foreign wars and disdained the voters that put him in office in 2016.
He thinks the United States has been a soft touch, letting its values get in the way of maximizing its power while savvier nations have taken advantage while getting fat on its generosity -- see NATO.
Even in his own party, there are those who believe his abandonment of American core principles and global leadership is catastrophic.
"There isn't enough money in the world to purchase back our credibility on human rights and the way nations should conduct themselves," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, said in an interview on CNN's "New Day" on Tuesday.
What Trump does next will decide whether Washington is able to credibly criticize strongmen like Putin and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, he said.
"We can't say anything about that if we allow Saudi Arabia to do it and all we do is a diplomatic slap on the wrist," Rubio said.
A senior administration official told CNN's Barbara Starr that the decision on what to do with the Saudis may be the "the most consequential" of Trump's presidency, since it will dictate whether US military leaders and diplomats can maintain a moral high ground on human rights.
That's unlikely to change Trump's mind, since any rupture with the Saudis would endanger his effort to destabilize and pressure Iran.
He is relying on Saudi Arabia to release more oil onto the market to meet demand after pressuring allies to stop imports from Iran.
Riyadh, of course, has considerable influence on the state of the global economy and therefore Trump's own prospects of re-election with its power to engineer spikes in global oil prices.
In the longer term, foreign policy traditionalists worry about what Trump's ideological turn means for the American-led world order.
"The order in essence was based in trust. People had to trust the United States to ultimately do the right thing. You were willing to give it room to fail and to make mistakes but then to come back," Daalder, a former US ambassador to NATO, said.
"He has fundamentally broken that trust."
Smitty
DCC 4Life
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2013
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- 24,097
Bipo, serious non-insult point here....
You can't be arguing against policing the world and then also be outraged that Trump isn't outraged that the Saudis are shitbags.
People complain that there is no difference between the two parties on so many issues -- that Bush was a neo-con and a warhawk, that Obama continued foreign intervention, that Hillary was going to continue both of their policies and escalate action in Syria, etc.
Well, in the absence of getting some drum beating Peacenik, apathy is about the best you can hope for. Trump doesn't care about geopolitics, he doesn't care about policing the world, he doesn't care about his image appearing "tough" or "soft" on North Korea, so of course he'll go meet with a murderous Kim Jong Un and shake his hand and say nice things about him.
He doesn't play by the old rulebook.
Would a more principled, Ron Paul type who is gonna close bases be better? Sure.
But this is a real difference.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't be arguing against policing the world and then also be outraged that Trump isn't outraged that the Saudis are shitbags.
People complain that there is no difference between the two parties on so many issues -- that Bush was a neo-con and a warhawk, that Obama continued foreign intervention, that Hillary was going to continue both of their policies and escalate action in Syria, etc.
Well, in the absence of getting some drum beating Peacenik, apathy is about the best you can hope for. Trump doesn't care about geopolitics, he doesn't care about policing the world, he doesn't care about his image appearing "tough" or "soft" on North Korea, so of course he'll go meet with a murderous Kim Jong Un and shake his hand and say nice things about him.
He doesn't play by the old rulebook.
Would a more principled, Ron Paul type who is gonna close bases be better? Sure.
But this is a real difference.
You can't have it both ways.
BipolarFuk
Demoted
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- Apr 7, 2013
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- 11,464
You got it backwards.
I want to use this murder to completely cut ties with those fucking shitbag camel fuckers.
But he won't do so because he desperately wants to sell these scum 100 billion + worth of weapons.
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2013
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- 136,878
And they just love his hotels and golf courses.
BipolarFuk
Demoted
- Joined
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- Messages
- 11,464
BipolarFuk
Demoted
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2013
- Messages
- 11,464
Conservatives mount a whisper campaign smearing Khashoggi in defense of Trump
Conservatives mount a whisper campaign smearing Khashoggi in defense of Trump
Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom.
In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.
Trump’s remarks about reporters amid the Khashoggi fallout have inflamed existing tensions between his allies and the media. At a Thursday rally in Montana, Trump openly praised Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) for assaulting a reporter in his bid for Congress last year.
“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said.
Hours earlier, prominent conservative television personalities were making insinuations about Khashoggi’s background.
“Khashoggi was tied to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asserted on Thursday’s highly rated “Outnumbered” show. “I just put it out there because it is in the constellation of things that are being talked about.” Faulkner then dismissed another guest who called her claim “iffy.”
The message was echoed on the campaign trail. Virginia Republican Corey A. Stewart, who is challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), told a local radio program Thursday that “Khashoggi was not a good guy himself.”
While Khashoggi was once sympathetic to Islamist movements, he moved toward a more liberal, secular point of view, according to experts on the Middle East who have tracked his career. Khashoggi knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactions with bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.
Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen, left his home country last year and was granted residency in the United States by federal authorities. He lived in Virginia and wrote for The Washington Post.
Nevertheless, the smears have escalated. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and key political booster, shared another person’s tweet last week with his millions of followers that included a line that Khashoggi was “tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden” in the 1980s, even though the context was a feature story on bin Laden’s activities.
A Tuesday broadcast of CR-TV, a conservative online outlet founded by popular talk-radio host Mark Levin, labeled Khashoggi a “longtime friend” of terrorists and claimed without evidence that Trump was the victim of an “insane” media conspiracy to tarnish him. The broadcast has been viewed more than 12,000 times.
A story in far-right FrontPage magazine casts Khashoggi as a “cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about,” and features a garish cartoon of bin Laden and Khashoggi with their arms around each other.
The conservative push comes as Saudi government supporters on Twitter have sought in a propaganda campaign to denigrate Khashoggi as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement once tolerated but now outlawed in Saudi Arabia as a terrorist organization.
“Trump wants to take a soft line, so Trump supporters are finding excuses for him to take it,” said William Kristol, a conservative Trump critic. “One of those excuses is attacking the person who was murdered.”
Several Trump administration aides are aware of the Khashoggi attacks circulating on Capitol Hill and in conservative media, the GOP officials said, adding that aides are being careful to not encourage the disparagement but are also doing little to contest it.
The GOP officials declined to share the names of the lawmakers and others who are circulating information critical of Khashoggi because they said doing so would risk exposing them as sources.
Fred Hiatt, The Post’s editorial page editor who published Khashoggi’s work, sharply criticized the false and distorted claims about Khashoggi, who is feared to have been killed and dismembered by Saudi operatives.
“As anyone knows who knew Jamal — or read his columns — he was dedicated to the values of free speech and open debate. He went into exile to promote those values, and now he may even have lost his life for his dogged determination in their defense,” Hiatt said in a statement. “It may not be surprising that some Saudi-inspired trolls are now trying to distract us from the crime by smearing Jamal. It may not even be surprising to see a few Americans joining in. But in both cases it is reprehensible.”
Trump said Thursday it appears Khashoggi is dead and warned that his administration could consider “very severe” measures against Saudi Arabia, which is conducting its own self-investigation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also announced that he would not attend the Future Investment Initiative summit in Saudi Arabia next week, delivering the Trump administration’s first formal rebuke of Saudi Arabia’s royal family.
“The president is concerned. He believes the relationship is important, so do I, but he also understands he’s a leader on the world stage and everybody is watching and he is very concerned,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who met with Trump on Thursday.
Trump, whose grip on his party remains strong less than three weeks before the midterm elections, has seen his cautious approach to Saudi Arabia bolstered not only by the maligning of Khashoggi, but also by a conservative media infrastructure that is generally wary of traditional news organizations and establishment Republicans. As criticism of Trump grows, powerful players in that orbit have stood by the president.
“Donald Trump is keeping his eye on the ball, keeping his eye on the geopolitical ball, the national security ball. He’s not going to get sidetracked by what happened to a journalist, maybe, in the consulate there. He’s not giving cover to anybody,” syndicated talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday.
“For those who are screaming blood for the Saudis — look, these people are key allies,” evangelical leader Pat Robertson said this week. “We’ve got an arms deal that everybody wanted a piece of. ... It’ll be a lot of jobs, a lot of money come to our coffers. It’s not something you want to blow up willy-nilly.”
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill, on the other hand, are discussing the possibility of legislative action against Saudi Arabia or other ways to lessen U.S. support.
Intelligence community officials this week have been providing continuous briefings on the investigation into Khashoggi’s disappearance to the intelligence committees, whose members enjoy special clearance to view and hear sensitive information.
But in both the House and Senate, lawmakers without such clearance, including the leading Republicans on foreign policy matters, have grown frustrated with what many see as a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to slow-walk responses to congressional requests for information about Khashoggi’s disappearance, or in some cases ignore lawmakers’ questions outright.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) have taken the step of invoking the Global Magnitsky Act to force Trump to report to Congress on whether people should face sanctions over Khashoggi’s alleged death, including Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Yet there has been little confidence among senators that Trump will suddenly feel pressure to penalize high-ranking Saudi officials or take other sweeping punitive measures.
In the House, a perceived lack of cooperation from the White House on Khashoggi has compelled some Republicans to take new interest in a bill to invoke the War Powers Resolution to curtail U.S. military support for the Saudi-led coalition operating in Yemen’s civil war. But the legislation has not secured the support of leading Republicans.
Last year, the House voted 366 to 30 to approve a nonbinding resolution stating that the United States’ support for the Saudi-led coalition had not been congressionally authorized — an effort that did not rattle the administration, which continued to build its relationships with Saudi royalty.
Earlier this year, the Senate failed to enact legislation that would have curtailed U.S. support for the Saudi war effort, after appeals from Saudi officials and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis not to pass the measure.
______________________________
Pat fuckin Robertson, man of God, wringing his hands over selling weapons to scum.
Conservatives mount a whisper campaign smearing Khashoggi in defense of Trump
Hard-line Republicans and conservative commentators are mounting a whispering campaign against Jamal Khashoggi that is designed to protect President Trump from criticism of his handling of the dissident journalist’s alleged murder by operatives of Saudi Arabia — and support Trump’s continued aversion to a forceful response to the oil-rich desert kingdom.
In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Those aspersions — which many lawmakers have been wary of stating publicly because of the political risks of doing so — have begun to flare into public view as conservative media outlets have amplified the claims, which are aimed in part at protecting Trump as he works to preserve the U.S.-Saudi relationship and avoid confronting the Saudis on human rights.
Trump’s remarks about reporters amid the Khashoggi fallout have inflamed existing tensions between his allies and the media. At a Thursday rally in Montana, Trump openly praised Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) for assaulting a reporter in his bid for Congress last year.
“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said.
Hours earlier, prominent conservative television personalities were making insinuations about Khashoggi’s background.
“Khashoggi was tied to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asserted on Thursday’s highly rated “Outnumbered” show. “I just put it out there because it is in the constellation of things that are being talked about.” Faulkner then dismissed another guest who called her claim “iffy.”
The message was echoed on the campaign trail. Virginia Republican Corey A. Stewart, who is challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), told a local radio program Thursday that “Khashoggi was not a good guy himself.”
While Khashoggi was once sympathetic to Islamist movements, he moved toward a more liberal, secular point of view, according to experts on the Middle East who have tracked his career. Khashoggi knew bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s during the civil war in Afghanistan, but his interactions with bin Laden were as a journalist with a point of view who was working with a prized source.
Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen, left his home country last year and was granted residency in the United States by federal authorities. He lived in Virginia and wrote for The Washington Post.
Nevertheless, the smears have escalated. Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son and key political booster, shared another person’s tweet last week with his millions of followers that included a line that Khashoggi was “tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden” in the 1980s, even though the context was a feature story on bin Laden’s activities.
A Tuesday broadcast of CR-TV, a conservative online outlet founded by popular talk-radio host Mark Levin, labeled Khashoggi a “longtime friend” of terrorists and claimed without evidence that Trump was the victim of an “insane” media conspiracy to tarnish him. The broadcast has been viewed more than 12,000 times.
A story in far-right FrontPage magazine casts Khashoggi as a “cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about,” and features a garish cartoon of bin Laden and Khashoggi with their arms around each other.
The conservative push comes as Saudi government supporters on Twitter have sought in a propaganda campaign to denigrate Khashoggi as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement once tolerated but now outlawed in Saudi Arabia as a terrorist organization.
“Trump wants to take a soft line, so Trump supporters are finding excuses for him to take it,” said William Kristol, a conservative Trump critic. “One of those excuses is attacking the person who was murdered.”
Several Trump administration aides are aware of the Khashoggi attacks circulating on Capitol Hill and in conservative media, the GOP officials said, adding that aides are being careful to not encourage the disparagement but are also doing little to contest it.
The GOP officials declined to share the names of the lawmakers and others who are circulating information critical of Khashoggi because they said doing so would risk exposing them as sources.
Fred Hiatt, The Post’s editorial page editor who published Khashoggi’s work, sharply criticized the false and distorted claims about Khashoggi, who is feared to have been killed and dismembered by Saudi operatives.
“As anyone knows who knew Jamal — or read his columns — he was dedicated to the values of free speech and open debate. He went into exile to promote those values, and now he may even have lost his life for his dogged determination in their defense,” Hiatt said in a statement. “It may not be surprising that some Saudi-inspired trolls are now trying to distract us from the crime by smearing Jamal. It may not even be surprising to see a few Americans joining in. But in both cases it is reprehensible.”
Trump said Thursday it appears Khashoggi is dead and warned that his administration could consider “very severe” measures against Saudi Arabia, which is conducting its own self-investigation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also announced that he would not attend the Future Investment Initiative summit in Saudi Arabia next week, delivering the Trump administration’s first formal rebuke of Saudi Arabia’s royal family.
“The president is concerned. He believes the relationship is important, so do I, but he also understands he’s a leader on the world stage and everybody is watching and he is very concerned,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who met with Trump on Thursday.
Trump, whose grip on his party remains strong less than three weeks before the midterm elections, has seen his cautious approach to Saudi Arabia bolstered not only by the maligning of Khashoggi, but also by a conservative media infrastructure that is generally wary of traditional news organizations and establishment Republicans. As criticism of Trump grows, powerful players in that orbit have stood by the president.
“Donald Trump is keeping his eye on the ball, keeping his eye on the geopolitical ball, the national security ball. He’s not going to get sidetracked by what happened to a journalist, maybe, in the consulate there. He’s not giving cover to anybody,” syndicated talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh said Tuesday.
“For those who are screaming blood for the Saudis — look, these people are key allies,” evangelical leader Pat Robertson said this week. “We’ve got an arms deal that everybody wanted a piece of. ... It’ll be a lot of jobs, a lot of money come to our coffers. It’s not something you want to blow up willy-nilly.”
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill, on the other hand, are discussing the possibility of legislative action against Saudi Arabia or other ways to lessen U.S. support.
Intelligence community officials this week have been providing continuous briefings on the investigation into Khashoggi’s disappearance to the intelligence committees, whose members enjoy special clearance to view and hear sensitive information.
But in both the House and Senate, lawmakers without such clearance, including the leading Republicans on foreign policy matters, have grown frustrated with what many see as a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to slow-walk responses to congressional requests for information about Khashoggi’s disappearance, or in some cases ignore lawmakers’ questions outright.
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) have taken the step of invoking the Global Magnitsky Act to force Trump to report to Congress on whether people should face sanctions over Khashoggi’s alleged death, including Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Yet there has been little confidence among senators that Trump will suddenly feel pressure to penalize high-ranking Saudi officials or take other sweeping punitive measures.
In the House, a perceived lack of cooperation from the White House on Khashoggi has compelled some Republicans to take new interest in a bill to invoke the War Powers Resolution to curtail U.S. military support for the Saudi-led coalition operating in Yemen’s civil war. But the legislation has not secured the support of leading Republicans.
Last year, the House voted 366 to 30 to approve a nonbinding resolution stating that the United States’ support for the Saudi-led coalition had not been congressionally authorized — an effort that did not rattle the administration, which continued to build its relationships with Saudi royalty.
Earlier this year, the Senate failed to enact legislation that would have curtailed U.S. support for the Saudi war effort, after appeals from Saudi officials and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis not to pass the measure.
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Pat fuckin Robertson, man of God, wringing his hands over selling weapons to scum.
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So, you have a 7,000 strong caravan of migrants marching to your border basically daring you to stop them.
Honestly, I can't fault Trump for his stance.
Of course, he fucked up the message by saying there were "middle easterners" in with the rabble.
That is going to trigger a lot of the bleeding hearts and what not.
Honestly, I can't fault Trump for his stance.
Of course, he fucked up the message by saying there were "middle easterners" in with the rabble.
That is going to trigger a lot of the bleeding hearts and what not.
NoDak
Hotlinking' sonofabitch
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I'd bet that's precisely what the left is hoping he'll do. Then they can flail and gnash their teeth about how the big meany in the White House is using the threat of violence against poor, innocent refugees.
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I wouldn't have an issue with that.
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Funny thing is, they showed interviews of many of them. And even in a left-leaning media, I was shocked they aired some of the ones that basically said they wanted to work in the U.S. and send their money home.
No "American Dream". No bullshit. They want a job so they can send money home.
L.T. Fan
I'm Easy If You Are
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The timing of their dream is suspect.
BipolarFuk
Demoted
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All teh violence is by the LEFT!! lol
All teh violence is by the LEFT!! lol
"An object that appeared to be an explosive device was found in a mailbox at the home of George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has donated heavily to liberal causes and is a frequent target of unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories."
All teh violence is by the LEFT!! lol
"An object that appeared to be an explosive device was found in a mailbox at the home of George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who has donated heavily to liberal causes and is a frequent target of unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories."
L.T. Fan
I'm Easy If You Are
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It’s Halloween time. A human fecal blivett is potentially explosive.
BipolarFuk
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