Trump After Saudi Palace Coup: ‘We’ve Put
Our Man on Top’
By Spencer Ackerman
January 07, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year old Saudi
crown prince in the process of purging his
blood-relation rivals for the throne, is an
“inveterate player of video games,” in
Michael Wolff’s explosive book Fire & Fury.
A lesser-explored section of the book shows
MBS throwing himself into cultivating Trump
as a step toward consolidating his own
power. His path was to ignore Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson in favor of son-in-law
Jared Kushner – looking to family channels
instead of formal ones is a characteristic
of most authoritarian countries – like
“meeting someone nice at your first day of
boarding school,” a Kushner friend observed.
Leveraging Trump’s ignorance, Kushner’s
inexperience, a shared hostility toward Iran
and the administration’s allergy to Obama’s
foreign policy, MBS dangled a shiny orb in
front of the White House: Middle East peace,
to satisfy Trump’s longing for a grand
victory. It’s MBS who brokers Trump’s Louis
XIV-like reception in Riyadh, a gaudy
spectacle of adulation in which the Saudis
assembled a host of Middle Eastern strongmen
to seal a symbolic allegiance with Trump
through touching a bizarre glowing sphere.
“Jared’s gotten the Arabs on his side,”
Wolff quotes Trump. When MBS moved in
November to purge his opposition, Trump
“would tell friends that he and Jared had
engineered a Saudi coup,” Wolff writes, with
Trump boasting: “We’ve put our man on top!”
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The immediate question for the Trump-MBS relationship is whether MBS can actually deliver the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab peace entente Trump desires, a herculean task under any circumstance and one complicated even more by Trump’s formal recognition of Jerusalem as exclusively Israeli. But MBS, now entrenched as crown prince, already got what he wanted from Trump.
This article was originally published by Daily Beast -
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