On November 18, Donald Trump literally rolled out the red carpet and gave a ceremonial military welcome to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the modernizing autocrat who rules over the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Although his family kingdom and its wealth are based on the production of oil that is driving global warming, although he presides over hundreds of executions of mostly poor people every year, although they don’t even pretend to care about democratic rights for their subjects, and although he likely ordered the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump welcomed him warmly and even aggressively defended him when journalists asked about his crimes. That’s because Trump doesn’t go through all the baloney that most U.S. presidents go through to act as if they care about human rights or democracy. For Trump and his allies, it’s all about making his family and his billionaire friends richer. Unlike most presidents, he’s just totally open about it, and totally clear that he doesn’t care about anyone or anything else.
For those who thought Trump would “put America first,” Tuesday’s ceremony, oval office press conference and the lavish dinner that followed should make it obvious that that was never the case. First Trump agreed to allow Lockheed-Martin to sell their sophisticated F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Then he agreed to sell advanced Nvidia computer chips to a Saudi company. This also despite the fact that M.B.S. (as the crown prince is often called) didn’t join Trump’s 2020 Abraham Accords (a deal linking Israel with some Arab states) or commit to not deepening economic and military ties with China. So much for Trump’s concern about putting “America first.”
Of course, Trump did get the Saudi ruler to agree to sell the United States more rare-earth minerals, something the U.S. military and tech sectors have been desperate for since Trump’s tariffs made China pull back on sales to the U.S. And M.B.S. did say that his oil-rich kingdom would invest something close to $1 trillion in the U.S., but as with most of the promises of investment that other nations have already made to Trump, there were no specific timelines laid out or specific investments announced. Trump simply says there’s a deal, talks about how great it will be, and then the details are never fully worked out. So much for Trump being a great dealmaker for the so-called American people or putting “America first” against the rest of the world.
But Trump did actually accomplish his main goals: cozying up to the prince and Saudi Arabian wealth so that he can appear to be a strongman leader just like M.B.S., and so that his family and capitalist supporters can make even bigger business deals with the outrageously rich Saudi royal family.
The Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund (the fund that holds the wealth of the royal family) has invested $2 billion in an investment fund run by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. This was the biggest single investment in Kushner’s young company, and money he could never have hoped to pull together on his own. Kushner’s company and the sovereign wealth fund are also combining to buy a video game company for an estimated $55 billion, again a purchase far beyond what Kushner’s fund could have achieved on its own. A Saudi owned golf tournament company is hosting tournaments at Trump golf courses, making the Trump family millions. At least three Trump-branded projects are underway in Saudi Arabia through Dar Global, a Trump business partner that has close ties to the Saudi government. And the Saudi government is directly contracting the Trump organization to build a government-owned development under a company called Diriyah, which is run directly by M.B.S. himself.
Trump is willing to give M.B.S. and Saudi Arabia almost anything they want because Saudi wealth is pumping up the wealth of Trump dramatically, including his family businesses and his son-in-law’s business. These huge investments in Trump companies are effectively open bribes to Trump. Give him money, and he’ll give them whatever they want or let them do whatever they want.
And beyond just Trump and his family businesses, it is quite clear that this entire show for M.B.S. was about advancing the interests of the other big capitalists around Trump. The list of attendees at the state dinner for M.B.S. included all the top business leaders who are either good partners to Trump businesses or who have kissed Trump’s ass enough to be there. Along with Elon Musk, lots of other big capitalists doing business in Saudi Arabia were there. The leaders of Apple, Cisco, Dell, Salesforce, Coinbase, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Paramount Global, Chevron, Citigroup, Blackstone, Bechtel, General Motors, Ford, Pershing Square Capital, Qualcomm, Pfizer, GE Aerospace, Honeywell, Palantir Technologies, Boeing, General Dynamics, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab, Lockheed-Martin, Northrup Grumman, Wynn Resorts and Zoom were all in attendance. This dinner was quite literally a giant and fancy business meeting in which some of the wealthiest and most influential capitalists in the U.S. (and world) met over food with some of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest government officials and business leaders. And at least a few of them walked away with new commercial deals in the works with the Saudi kingdom. It was all about the money and how to hook up with other wealth people who can help them make more of it.
The entire scene – from the military display to the lavish dinner and business deals – reminds us clearly of why all of these people need to be tossed into the dustbin of history.
They hire and fire us. They lie to us. They insult us. They build commodities we may or may not need. They finance the destruction of our planet. They build spaceships that we don’t need and want to send people to Mars for no good reason. They drive their nations toward imperialist conflict and war with other competitor nations. They create technologies used to monitor us, apprehend migrants, and kill us more efficiently in wars. They spend money on each other to make more money. They eat luxurious meals in fancy suits while they cut food and health benefits to the poor of the U.S. and the world. They are leeches and exploiters who care only about their profits. They don’t care at all about the other billions of humans on the planet with them. We should call them what they are: traitors to humanity.
They must be gotten rid of. But no politician or anyone else will do it for us. It’s up to us to do it. We’ll need to organize and build our forces, we’ll need to engage in a real struggle, and we’ll need to do it collectively. But it can be done.
