As president, Donald Trump made little effort to hide his affinity for Saudi Arabia. In fact, the Republican’s first overseas trip while in office — traditionally, a symbolically significant sojourn — was to Riyadh. When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman imprisoned other members of the royal family, Trump announced his support for the move. When the Saudis imposed a blockade on U.S. allies in Qatar, Trump endorsed this, too.
A few years later, the Republican boasted to Bob Woodward about “saving” MBC from scrutiny after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. “I saved his ass,” the then-president said. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone.”
After leaving office, Trump cultivated the connections — partnering with the Saudis on a golf project — as did his son-in-law: Jared Kushner created a private equity firm that received $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Evidently, those connections remain strong. The New York Times reported overnight that a Trump-owned property is seeing a “surge in business” thanks to a deal “to host tournaments for LIV Golf, the upstart league sponsored by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.”
And as it turns out, that wasn’t the only notable Times report in today’s edition.
Former President Donald J. Trump spoke recently with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, their first publicly disclosed conversation since Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, according to two people briefed on the discussion who were not authorized to speak publicly about it.
We don’t yet know what the two men discussed, but according to the Times’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the Trump/MBS conversation “comes at a time when the Biden administration is engaged in delicate negotiations with the Saudis aimed at establishing a lasting peace in the Middle East.”
It’s difficult to say with confidence whether the former president was subverting his own country’s foreign policy agenda, though it’s worth emphasizing that Trump appears to have a foreign policy agenda of his own — despite the fact that he’s a private citizen with no official authority.
Just last month, for example, the former president welcomed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to Mar-a-Lago, and according to Orbán, the two held private discussions about U.S. policy toward Ukraine.
Soon after, The Washington Post reported that Richard Grenell, a former diplomat and intelligence official in Trump’s administration, has recently met with a variety of far-right leaders around the world.
The former president has taken to calling Grenell his “envoy,” despite the fact that it can get a little tricky when presidential candidates have their own envoys — whose goals, messages, and priorities might differ from that of the current U.S. administration. Indeed, let’s not forget that while Trump was in the White House, he called for the prosecution of former Secretary of State John Kerry because the Massachusetts Democrat interacted with foreign officials without coordinating. In 2019, Trump — who routinely tried to get the Justice Department to prosecute political figures he disliked — insisted that Kerry “should be prosecuted” for violating the Logan Act, adding, “He’s talking to Iran and has had many meetings and many phone calls and he’s telling them what to do. That is total violation of the Logan Act.” Trump had no idea what he was talking about, but he appeared convinced that a former U.S. official interacting with foreign governments was both scandalous and criminal. Evidently, he’s changed his mind?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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