Just before the onset of the pandemic, I’d started researching a longer project about the personalization of global politics which was accelerated by but not started by Trump. In a way, personalization is the inevitable companion of authoritarianism and autocracy. If there’s one guy who runs the show in each country, then the affairs of that state inherently become indistinguishable from that of the autocrat and his personal checkbook. Relationships between states become those of individual people.
Early in Biden’s presidency, I spoke to one of the very high-end hedge funders who are in the class of people who get invited to the dinners and shindigs with Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh. This was around the time that Jared Kushner got that huge $2 billion investment in his new post-White House fund. This source described one of those dinners to me that had occurred not long before that investment. Kushner was seated to MBS’s right or left. I can’t remember which, but same difference. Given how much power MBS wields and his near unilateral control over hundreds of billions of dollars, people would probably literally kill for that level of preferment and proximity. But as it was conveyed to me, everything about that weekend or series of days suggested that Jared was just MBS’s guy. As in, MBS just loved Jared. And remember, Trump was out of power. And in early 2022 or possibly late 2021, it was by no means an obvious bet that he’d be returning to power. The relationship seemed to go far beyond a bet on the Trump family returning to power.
When I was doing this initial research, I was interested in the degree to which that world — the world of the oligarchs — was stitched together not only by money but by what in Russia they call “Kompromat.” I’m not trying to get back into that discourse, which was such a thing in Trump’s first term. But there’s a real analog. I’m talking about the use of hacking, often with the services of private companies based in Israel, to collect damaging information on rivals. It’s power. It’s a cudgel. But it’s also a kind of way to stitch that whole world together. No one goes too rogue because everyone knows a lot about everyone else. Remember not long before when Jeff Bezos got hacked and he accused MBS of being behind it?
I published that TPM Reader note last night because it captured the real spectacle of the plane story. The U.S. isn’t down at the heels and in need of a hand-out plane. We could buy a million planes. In fact, it’s a Boeing plane the Qataris have dangled in front of Trump. So in a basic way, we actually sold it to them in the first place. We’re here because one guy, Donald Trump, really, really likes luxury things. And beyond liking luxury things, he likes people giving him luxury things. Having to buy takes half the fun out of it. In any real sense, for the U.S. government, having to retrofit the pimpmobile plane is more trouble than it’s worth. This is about Trump wanting the pimpmobile plane.
There’s a side light to this lurid drama worth noting. Trump’s campaign against foreign students in the U.S. has been at least nominally focused on support for Hamas among the protests against the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. Butler and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has several times recently said that “Hamas supporters” are not welcome in the U.S. and will be expelled. And yet the Qataris are quite literally the top bankrollers of Hamas and they speak for them and help them negotiate with the Great Powers and with Israel. It reminds me of a story about Karl Lueger, the populist Mayor of Vienna at the turn of the 20th century who was one of the key articulators of and arguably one of the creators of mass-politics political antisemitism. And yet Lueger would himself dine with and socialize with members of the capital’s Jewish elite. There’s a famous story in which someone asks Lueger: “You’re the big enemy of the Jews and yet you socialize with them and some are your friends. How can you justify that?” To which, Lueger is said to have responded, “I decide who’s a Jew.”
Like Lueger, like Trump. He’ll decide who’s a Hamas supporter.
But this and everything we’ve discussed to this point bring us to this key recognition: this whole trip is really about Trump, along with the Saudis and the Qataris. It’s about doing business. Trump’s business. And there’s another aspect of it. You notice Elon’s there? And so is his rival, OpenAI’s Sam Altman. And it’s actually a similar cast of characters to the ones we saw at the inauguration. Jensen Huang, the head of Nvidia, is there too, as is the Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer of Alphabet (parent company of Google). Bezos isn’t there. But the new CEO of Amazon Andrew Jassy is. The Times piece shows a genuinely staggering list of CEOs who are part of this trip, the CEOs of IBM, Boeing, Palantir, Halliburton, Citigroup and a bunch of others.
Now in fairness, trade delegations have always played a role in these visits. But this is at a totally, totally different level. In fact, if you step back, you see that this entire visit isn’t mostly about U.S. foreign policy at all. Trump is bringing “his” CEOs and everyone is cutting deals. And as the top dog, Trump is cutting his too — and to be clear, not as President of the United States, but as Trump. Eric Trump has already been in Qatar inking a whole slew of new deals with the country’s royal family.
This is the right way to understand the 747 pimpmobile “gift.” It’s basically a sweetener to get a whole series of business and consummated relationships over the finish line, and yes a few of them are tied to the U.S. government. In a real sense, the sales of military hardware are the payback for the personal business deals. Calling it a “bribe” almost doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like the decked-out Maserati one Fortune 50 CEO gives to another after they ink a $100 billion merger — a kind of token of appreciation for a vastly larger transaction, which in the case of Trump involves subverting U.S. foreign policy to the interests not only of Trump’s pocketbook but cementing his power within the U.S. If Trump can use his power as President to cut in all the big CEOs on the money geyser in Saudi Arabia, you can bet they are going to stay securely on his side in the U.S.
If we step a bit further back still we see this is where the meaning and the symbolism of the murderers row of tech oligarchs at the inauguration really comes into fruition. This is government, at home and abroad, of, for and by the oligarchs. If Elissa Slotkin doesn’t want me to say “oligarchs,” fine. We’ll focus on Trump wanting to be king. That’s another reason why he likes those folks — even the ones who bankroll Hamas. They’re kings. They get it. They’re Trump’s kinda guys.