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Donald Trump, who apparently is awfully sensitive about questions related to his old pal Jeffrey Epstein, called a reporter “piggy” when she asked him about it.
Piggy is funny choice of insult for Donald Trump, a man possessed of a genuinely swinish face and cankles swelling under his bulk, a man who looks like what Doc Frankenstein would have produced if his inputs had been limited to 300 pounds of Velveeta and a Jell-O mold. Another reporter asked about his chummy meeting with Saudi caudillo Mohammed bin Salman, upon whose orders Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was not only murdered but dismembered, sawed into bits while he was still alive. Trump spat that the reporter’s question was “insubordinate.”
Well, raise my rent.
There is a reason the reporter in question, Mary Bruce of ABC News, seems insubordinate to Trump: She is not his subordinate.
Trump was clearly flustered by the Saudi question, just as he is flustered by ongoing questions about his longstanding association with the notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. (“Many of them are on the younger side,” Trump once admiringly put it in describing Epstein’s habits.) If you want to deepen your appreciation of just how fundamentally dumb—I mean, just plain raw barnyard dumb—the man is, go and watch him fumble through his response to Mary Bruce.
An actual Machiavellian operator and dealmaker could have handled that question with no problem: “Saudi Arabia is a key American ally in the region, and we look forward to a deepening relationship based on mutual interests and a commitment to peace and stability in the region. That said, our relationship with the Saudi government has its points of contention, like any international relationship does, and the Khashoggi matter is an important one. My administration does not consider this issue resolved, and I will be bringing it up with the crown prince in our discussions.” That would have the added benefit of being potentially true. A real amoralist would then tell MBS that the White House needs a scalp to nail on the door and that Riyadh had better provide a big one if the kingdom wants those American airplanes instead of new American export controls.
Instead, Trump just complained that Khashoggi was “controversial,” and said there were a lot of people who “didn’t like that gentleman.” Well. I’m controversial. There are a lot of people who don’t like me—I have a blurb from Paul Krugman on the cover of one of my books that reads: “Truly reprehensible.” So, break out the bone saws? Khashoggi was not a U.S. citizen, but he was a U.S. permanent resident employed by a U.S. newspaper, and he had children who are U.S. citizens. You don’t get to saw apart columnists for being “controversial.”
And why was Khashoggi controversial? Because he thought MBS was a tyrant, which is true, and said so. Because he favored liberalization and a measure of democracy in his native country. Because he believed, as he put it in the last column he wrote before his murder and dismemberment, that “what the Arab world needs most is free expression.”
He was, in a word, insubordinate.
It has been said that Trump is able to operate with relative competence in the Middle East because he instinctively understands dynasty-minded autocrats and kleptocratic potentates such as MBS. I think that gets it backward: Trump operates with less friction among the Arab tyrants, Russian dictators, and Chinese autocrats because they understand him. He is a familiar type: a rich buffoon with political power he neither understands nor knows how to use. If the tables had been turned in the Khashoggi case, you can bet that Mohammed bin Salman would have used the situation to extract something he wanted—something useful to him or to his regime—rather than just blubbering about how unfair and in poor taste it was for an American journalist to inquire about the brutal murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist. The nerve of some people!
Trump’s family is taking in enormous sums of money in a spectacularly corrupt fashion—MBS knows what that looks like. Trump is getting ready to betray the U.S. commitment to Ukraine with a so-called peace plan that the Ukrainians have not even been asked about, effectively a declaration of fealty to Vladimir Putin. That is not going to surprise MBS. Trump illegally changes U.S. tariff rates from day to day depending on whether his feelings have been hurt by some Canadian politician you’ve never heard of—and that he hadn’t heard of, either, until somebody tweeted it at him. Such arbitrary use of state force is second nature to a prince and a tyrant. As far as the Republican Party goes, I will refer to my words from May 4, 2016: “Remember, you asked for this.” You yellow-bellied imbeciles.
And a word for Mary Bruce and her colleagues:
Stay insubordinate.
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