Good morning to everyone except whoever did the president’s makeup today:

Happy Wednesday.

by William Kristol

What a spectacle! There they were yesterday, assembled in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, autocrats and plutocrats and kleptocrats, gathered to enjoy each other’s company under the benevolent patronage of their host, His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Saudi Arabia was an appropriate destination for Donald Trump’s first foreign trip in his second term as president. He chose to visit not a democracy but a despotism; not a free nation but one of the world’s most unfree; not a land of tolerance but of repression.

And Trump made it clear yesterday that he did not consider these features unfortunate or undesirable aspects of life under the House of Saud. There was not a hint of criticism or even of hesitation in the fulsome praise Trump heaped upon his hosts. The American president admires the Saudi achievements in autocracy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy.

And so Trump paid homage to his “friend,” Mohammed bin Salman, who rules without consent and who brooks no dissent. “I like him a lot. I like him too much,” the president said. So much for the late Jamal Khashoggi. As to the kingdom over which bin Salman rules, Trump said the United States has “no stronger partner.” So much for the free nations with whom we are allied.

And Trump emphasized that the achievements of Saudi Arabia that he admires have nothing to do with democratic principles or ideas of freedom. Quite the opposite. He disparaged those who supported efforts at democratization and liberalization in the region—“the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits.”

“It’s crucial,” he said, “for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from Western intervention or . . . lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.”

Once upon a time, when American presidents still believed in the principles of the American republic, they accepted that they still had to work with despotisms like Saudi Arabia. Still, they mostly tried to move them along, even if slowly, toward the goal of a freer society. “Liberalization” was the hope, from Riyadh to Beijing. The goal may not have always been pursued consistently or effectively. But it was held out as a not-ignoble hope, as a desirable outcome.

No longer. The very word “liberalization” now seems antique. In the era of Trump and Putin and Xi and bin Salman and many others, autocracy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy are the way of the world. It is considered foolish to push back against these facts of life. Indeed it is thought to be desirable to embrace them.

More than two dozen American titans of business participated in a business lunch with bin Salman and Trump. They no doubt paid appropriate homage to the two autocrats, hoping to walk away, as Trump said, “with a lot of checks.” One doubts any of them uttered the words “freedom” or “democracy” or “consent of the governed.” One assumes none defended the importance of free speech or of dissent.

Dissent is not a thing in Saudi Arabia. Trump would of course like it not to be a thing in the United States of America.

We have an American president who regards the House of Saud not with disdain but with envy.

Share

PROGRAMMING ALERT! Set your calendars for Thursday, 9 p.m. EDT when The Bulwark will host an emergency briefing to discuss and explain the major changes to our nation’s healthcare system that Trump and allied Republicans are trying to push forward this week. The briefing will feature our own Jonathan Cohn, one of the best healthcare reporters in the business. He will give you world-class analysis and reporting and take your questions too. It’s the type of top-of-the-line content you won’t want to miss.

The briefing is exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Sign up today and join us Thursday night.

Add Livestream To Your Calendar

by Andrew Egger

A decade into the Trump era, congressional Republicans have mastered the skill of deflecting questions about his behavior. But if there’s one fun thing about Trump’s increasingly shocking and open corruption, it’s this: It’s been enough to throw even these masters of the craft off-script. You can see the canned “didn’t see the tweet”-style answers cracking as, beneath the surface, deep wells of incredulity threaten to erupt: The guy wants to accept a plane from WHERE??

Over at Meidas Touch, Ron Filipkowski has a good roundup of GOP lawmakers’ responses to the Qatari gift plane story yesterday. A few of the usual MAGA suspects kept heroically straight faces. “I have zero issue with it,” said Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin. “I understand it went through Pam Bondi,” said Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke. “So it’s legal. It’s ethical.”

More interesting were the GOP skeptics.

You had the usual Trump critics, of course: “How many of us have actually been offered the promise of a jet?” said Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. “When you get something of that value from a country, one typically thinks that there’s something in it for the country that is offering it.” South Dakota Rep. Dusty Johnson had a similar take: “I don’t like it. There’s a reason that people can’t even buy me a steak dinner. It’s not necessarily that you can prove I have an ethical problem, it’s that the appearance of it doesn’t look great.”

Leave a comment

There were the Trump allies from purple districts: “We don’t want to be straight-up accepting any type of gift from any foreign government,” said New York Rep. Mike Lawler, “certainly not one that can be viewed in a way that obviously has been presented here.”

But there were also a few somewhat surprising rebukes, coming from a pair of senators in good standing with the conservative media crowd. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz worried that “the plane poses significant espionage and surveillance problems,” while Sen. Rick Scott fretted over the president “flying on any plane owned by a foreign government, especially a foreign government that supports Hamas.”

All this is no more than words, of course. They could, in theory, join a resolution condemning the gift or join Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in holding up DOJ nominees over it. But the only real tool available to actually enforce their disapproval of such naked corruption as this is impeachment—and can you imagine any of these guys ratcheting their plastic-utensil criticisms up to that level?

Still, it drives home the point. Even the professional Trump-ignorers are finding it difficult to ignore this one entirely. And this does have one additional benefit: It personally irritates Trump, who is compelled by his sense of grievance to keep posting more and more defenses of his acceptance of the plane.

“Why should our military, and therefore our taxpayers, be forced to pay hundreds of millions of Dollars when they can get it for FREE from a country that wants to reward us for a job well done?” asked last night. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Keep it up, sir! Post about it every day until the midterms! You’re doing great!

Share

• Whites Only? On Just Between Us, MONA CHAREN and JVL discuss the welcome mat for Afrikaners, the Middle East corruption tour, and the neocon Pope!

• Trump’s Lies About Prices, Thoroughly Demolished… WILL SALETAN unpacks Donald Trump’s lies about the economy—food prices, tariffs, and job losses—and contrasts them with hard data highlighting how Trump dismisses economic warnings, blames others for downturns, and promotes approval ratings that don’t exist.

• The GOP Medicaid Cuts Are a Big F*cking Deal… 7.6 million newly uninsured, and that’s not even the whole story, writes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.

• Trump’s Free Qatari Jet Is ‘The Worst Idea Among Bad Ideas’… Plus: Howard Lutnick told everyone to buy Tesla stock. Congress had other ideas. Read more from JOE PERTICONE in Press Pass.

• Is Laura Loomer for Sale? In False Flag, WILL SOMMER notes that MAGA and MAHA diehards are wondering why the provocateur suddenly cares about Venezuelan oil production.

A WIN FOR THE ANTI-SACKS BRIGADE: The Verge dropped a fascinating new report last night about the White House’s abrupt firings last week of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter. It was, and we hope you’re sitting down for this reveal, an apparent pro-AI power play by Elon Musk and DOGE. But that power play, the report suggests, has now “backfired in spectacular fashion”:

When two men showed up at the Copyright Office inside the Library of Congress carrying letters purporting to appoint them to acting leadership positions, the DOGE takeover appeared to be complete. But those two men, Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves, were not DOGE at all, but instead approved by the MAGA wing of the Trump coalition that aims to put tech companies in check.

Perkins, now the supposed acting Register of Copyrights, is an eight-year veteran of the DOJ who served in the first Trump administration prosecuting fraud cases. Nieves, the putative acting deputy librarian, is currently at the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, having previously been a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, where he worked with Rep. Jim Jordan on Big Tech investigations. And Todd Blanche, the putative Acting Librarian of Congress who would be their boss, is a staunch Trump ally who represented him during his 2024 Manhattan criminal trial, and is now the Deputy Attorney General overseeing the DOJ’s side in the Google Search remedies case. As one government affairs lobbyist told The Verge, Blanche is “there to stick it to tech.”

The appointments of Blanche, Perkins, and Nieves are the result of furious lobbying over the weekend by the conservative content industry—as jealously protective of its copyrighted works as any other media companies—as well as populist Republican lawmakers and lawyers, all enraged that Silicon Valley had somehow persuaded Trump to fire someone who’d recently criticized AI companies.

The populists were particularly rankled over Perlmutter’s removal from the helm of the Copyright Office, which happened the day after the agency released a pre-publication version of its report on the use of copyrighted material in training generative AI systems. Sources speaking to The Verge are convinced the firings were a tech industry power play led by Elon Musk and “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar” David Sacks, meant to eliminate any resistance to AI companies using copyrighted material to train models without having to pay for it.

Pretty much every decision the White House makes these days is carried out to please one faction or another of right-wing maniacs. At least in this case, the administration seems to be prioritizing the group of maniacs who are making common cause with the rest of us.

PROTECTIONIST BEHAVIORAL TRAINING: Over at Semafor, Burgess Everett writes about how Trump has effectively shifted the Overton window on trade, which has left “many Republicans relatively content with placeholder agreements to leave in place tariffs that would have been unthinkable last year”:

“There’s a conditioning that’s taken place,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. told Semafor, describing fellow Republicans as “getting more comfortable” with defending the tariffs while professing they’d prefer another approach.

“10[%] isn’t as bad as 30. And 30 isn’t as bad as 145 or 175,” Cramer added. “Suddenly half of that is—I don’t want to say it’s tolerable—but it’s at least celebrated.” . . .

“He threatened real large tariffs he then backed off on to make a deal,” Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D, told Semafor. “My preference still is not to have an increase in costs on the American consumer. Let’s face it, a tariff is basically a sales tax.”

You could do a whole character study on the rich vein of that Cramer quote. But for a real sense of how off-balance the entire debate now is, check out this tweet from good ol’ Ronny Jackson, Trump’s crazed former physician and current member of Congress. “President Trump secured a GAME-CHANGING trade agreement with China, reducing tariffs and boosting American exports.”

Trump didn’t reduce tariffs. He brought them most of the way down from the astronomical levels to which he just raised them.

Cramer’s point about conditioning is a meaningful one. We’ve felt this ourselves: We were relieved this week when Trump finally backed out of his mutual-economic-destruction pact with China and pivoted to “only” 30 percent tariffs. Economic pain is better than economic devastation—but some might still wonder why we need the economic pain at all.

Share