October 2, 2018: There are certain things that the President of the United States has to avoid, first if he wants to be re-elected; then, if successful in that, if he wants to be remembered well by history.
As Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and both George Bushes found out, you can't have a major economic downturn on your watch.
As Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush found out, you can't have a war go badly on your watch -- or, as Carter also found out, you can't have a hostage crisis that drags out until it feels like a war.
As Grant, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush found out, you can't have a major scandal. (The one that the Republican Party tried to put on Bill Clinton didn't work: Having avoided the other things, he was more popular after a full 8 years than any President.)
And, as George W. Bush also found out, you can't be seen as screwing up the response to a devastating hurricane.
Except for a war, all of those things happened during the Presidency of Donald Trump. But what no one foresaw until Trump got into the White House was the possibility of a President being compromised by a foreign power.
Trump is compromised by, among other nations, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Without the backing of both of these nations, his financial empire wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on. (It still might not be.) And without their campaign contributions -- and hacking from at least the Russians and possibly also the Saudis -- he could not have become President.
On June 3, 2009, President Barack Obama met with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and appeared to bow before him. Trump had a public fit over this. But on January 23, 2015, Abdullah died, succeeded by his half-brother, King Salman; and on May 2017, Trump met with Salman in the Saudi national capital of Riyadh, received a gaudy medal from him, and appeared to curtsy right afterward.
Salman's health was already beginning to fail. On June 21, 2017, he appointed his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to run the country on his behalf. On that day, Trump called him to "congratulate him on his recent elevation." Trump and "MBS" pledged "close cooperation" on security and economic issues.
The month before, MBS publicly warned: "I confirm to you, no one will survive in a corruption case—whoever he is, even if he's a prince or a minister." He wasn't kidding: On November 4, the Saudi media announced the house arrest of some 200 wealthy businessmen and princes at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh, on various "corruption" charges. They became the subject of "The Night of Beating," with Saudi agents torturing them.
He became his country's absolute ruler at age 32.
This is why "foreign policy by obituary," waiting for
a tyrant to die so policy can change, usually doesn't work.
This included Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, an English-language news commentator and a major shareholder in Citigroup, Twitter, and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp; Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard; Adel Fakeih, Minister of Economy and Planning; and Admiral Abdullah bin Sultan bin Mohammed Al-Sultan, commander of the Royal Saudi Navy. As of October 2, 2022, Fakeih was still in custody; the others were quickly released, but have not been returned to any role in the Saudi government.
Jamal Khashoggi was born on October 13, 1958 in Medina, Saudi Arabia. He was an exiled journalist who had written damning exposes of his homeland's government. This was complicated by the fact that his grandfather, Mohammed Khashoggi, was the personal physician of King Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi state. His uncle, Adnan Khashoggi, was a billionaire arms dealer. He was also a first cousin of Dodi Fayed, the Egyptian film producer who was Princess Diana's boyfriend and was killed with her in the 1997 Paris car crash.
In a column printed in the April 3, 2018 edition of The Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi wrote that Saudi Arabia "should return to its pre-1979 climate, when the government restricted hard-line Wahhabi traditions. Women today should have the same rights as men. And all citizens should have the right to speak their minds without fear of imprisonment." In that same column, he said that Saudis "must find a way where we can accommodate secularism and Islam, something like what they have in Turkey," the country where he was then living. He also opposed the Saudi's intervention in neighboring Yemen.
He was no angel: He had just gotten married for the 3rd time, but was already planning to divorce his new wife and marry another woman. He was critical of Israel. He had even been friends with Osama bin Laden during the latter's opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but renounced bin Laden when he turned to violence against America. When bin Laden was killed in 2011, Khashoggi wrote, "You were beautiful and brave in those beautiful days in Afghanistan, before you surrendered to hatred and passion."
On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, where he was living, to obtain documents needed for his planned marriage. (He was already married, but planning to divorce his wife so he could marry someone else.) He never left alive, and word reached the outside world that he was murdered and dismembered inside the consulate. He was just short of turning 60, and left behind his wife, 2 sons and 2 daughters (with all 4 children from his 2nd marriage).
On November 16, the CIA determined that MBS has personally ordered the murder. This was not just an assassination: This was more like a Mob hit.
On December 11, 2018, Time magazine collectively named journalists they called "Guardians of the Truth" as their "Persons of the Year." They put Khashoggi on the cover as their stand-in. This made him, technically, the 1st person already dead to receive their Man/Person of the Year designation since the distinction was established in 1927. Time also cited journalists in the U.S., Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, Turkey, Sudan, Bangladesh, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Vietnam and the Philippines.
(No, John F. Kennedy didn't receive it in 1963, although he got it while alive in 1961. The 1963 recipient was Martin Luther King Jr.)
In 2021, the former Saudi intelligence official Saad al-Jabri said in an interview with CBS that bin Salman is "a psychopath, killer... with infinite resources, who poses threat to his people, to the Americans and to the planet."
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October 2, 2018 was a Tuesday. Football was in midweek. The NHL season started 2 days later; the NBA season, 15 days later. And only 1 baseball game was played. It was the National League Wild Card Game, at Wrigley Field in Chicago, and the Colorado Rockies beat the Chicago Cubs, 2-1. With 2 outs in the top of the 13th inning, the Rockies got consecutive singled from Trevor Story, Gerardo Parra and Tony Wolters to take the lead. The Rockies were subsequently swept by the Milwaukee Brewers in the NL Division Series.
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