“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” George Orwell
Transactional politics. At the most basic, it’s quid pro quo – you do something for me and I do something for you. Everyone wins. It’s like the political version of “Let’s Make a Deal.”
No one gets anything for nothing. But with the Trump administration, it’s a zero sum game. Both sides can’t win – there has to be a winner and a loser. And it has to happen in real time – not over time.
Trump sees diplomacy and interactions between nations filtered by how deeply they flatter him, the length of the red carpet they roll out and personal and financial ties he or his family have. Like everything else, it’s about him.
An example of transactional politics and foreign policy gone wrong is our relationship with Saudi Arabia. If there is a single nation responsible for the rise of Islamic terrorism, it’s this country. Fifteen of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis. But Trump didn’t include them in the Muslim ban. Ever wonder why?
As Trump said so eloquently during one of his rallies, “I make a lot of money with them. They buy all sorts of my stuff. All kinds of toys from Trump. They pay me millions and hundreds of millions. Why wouldn’t I like them?”
Well, here’s a reason: They brutally slaughtered a United States resident and journalist employed by an American newspaper and they made progressively ridiculous attempts to cover it up. And Trump bought into each one.
Jamal Khashoggi did not leave the Embassy in Istanbul as the Saudis first said. It was not a fist fight that went wrong as they next claimed. It was not an attempt at rendition (i.e. kidnapping) that went wrong – their last iteration. And there never has been an explanation of why the Crown Prince’s bodyguards and forensic surgeon, complete with bone saw, were flown to Istanbul in private jets prior to Khashoggi’s appointment at the Embassy.
Trump’s response? With every new Saudi version of events, he offered support for the Saudis – finally, when even he could no longer defend the indefensible, he said it was “the worst cover-up ever.”
Shame on them for all those botched cover-up attempts – but at that point, not a word condemning the horrific attack itself. In fact, he continued to praise the Crown Prince’s leadership, calling him a “good man” even after the Saudis finally admitted the murder and dismemberment were premeditated.
Trump is refusing to suspend the proposed $14 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia as a consequence for its actions. He inflated that sale to $450 billion and then rounded it up to $500 billion in his latest version. Same with jobs lost, which according to Politifact, does not come close to the one million Trump claimed.
What hasn’t been as widely reported is that a real estate start-up, partly owned by Jared Kushner, is looking for an investment of “at least $100 million from a private fund backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE” (Business Insider, May 2018). And there’s the entire 45th floor of Trump World Tower that Trump Inc. sold to the Kingdom. Groups lobbying on behalf of the Saudis stay in Trump-owned hotels in New York and Washington, D.C., dropping hundreds of thousands into the Trump coffers (Politifact.com/truthometer).
So now we get to Trump’s version of transactional diplomacy. It has nothing to do with what’s right or good. It has nothing to do with American values. You can do anything – literally anything – with impunity, as long as there’s a potential benefit to Trump. We’ve gone a long way from “the shining city on the hill.”
Trump still wants to sell American arms to the Saudi’s so they can continue to fight a proxy war in Yemen that’s killing tens of thousands of civilians and creating humanitarian crises for millions – using the arms we’ve sold them.
Kushner is using the Saudis and they are using us to isolate Iran. Our foreign policy is based on the enemy of my enemy, etc. and Yemeni civilians are in a vice we helped create.
Now the plot really sickens. Turkey has the evidence that finally forced the Saudis’ admission of guilt, though illogically, they continue to insist, even now, that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was unaware of the plot. At one point, to bribe Turkey not to release evidence against the Crown Prince, Trump considered turning over what Turkey’s President Erdogan wants most – a cleric living in the U.S. whom he blames for organizing a coup against him (NBC, PBS, The Guardian, Bipartisan Policy Center). But the CIA preempted that possibility by issuing a report stating they believed with “high confidence” that the Crown Prince ordered the killing of Khashoggi.
Trump’s response? Meh. A shrug. “There’s really no way of knowing.” “Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.” He chose to believe a ruthless dictator vs. his own intelligence agency and in doing so, “granted absolution for chopping up a Washington Post columnist” (Joe Scarborough, Nov. 21, 2018). Former Ambassador Marc Ginsberg called Trump’s reaction a “gut punch to American values.”
Trump’s response is outrageous. Every American should be offended. We need to ask ourselves what we stand for if we allow American values to be trumped, not by an outside enemy, but by our own despot-in-training.
There appears to be no limit Trump won’t go to or depth he won’t sink if, to cite another game show, “the price is right.” It’s long past time that Congress and the American people say, “Game over.”
Marsha Shearer is a Villager and a frequent contributor to Villages-News.com.