He 100% can’t tell them apart. ??
— dats_moy (@dats-moy.bsky.social) May 14, 2025 at 10:35 AM
After selling us out in Saudi Arabia, we were sold in Qatar. The WH “fact sheet” is just gaslighting. All it does is mentioning “some deals” as an example, like “Boeing receiving $96B order from Qatar Air”; “Parsons securing projects for 97B”, this is then presented as “securing US jobs”
Part 2 ??— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) May 14, 2025 at 12:19 PM
The “fact sheet” ends with this
“As the dealmaker in chief, President Trump’s latest achievement in Qatar is another win for America.”
How? Our security is compromised and major businesses dependent on ONE COUNTRY as the money source.
It’s just “sale, everything must go” vibes.
— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) May 14, 2025 at 12:24 PM
William Kristol, at the Bulwark == “Autocrats, Kleptocrats, Plutocrats… Oh My!”:
… Saudi Arabia was an appropriate destination for Donald Trump’s first foreign trip in his second term as president. He chose to visit not a democracy but a despotism; not a free nation but one of the world’s most unfree; not a land of tolerance but of repression.
And Trump made it clear yesterday that he did not consider these features unfortunate or undesirable aspects of life under the House of Saud. There was not a hint of criticism or even of hesitation in the fulsome praise Trump heaped upon his hosts. The American president admires the Saudi achievements in autocracy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy…
And Trump emphasized that the achievements of Saudi Arabia that he admires have nothing to do with democratic principles or ideas of freedom. Quite the opposite. He disparaged those who supported efforts at democratization and liberalization in the region—“the so-called nation builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits.”
“It’s crucial,” he said, “for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from Western intervention or . . . lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.”…
Josh Marshall, at TPM — “Personalization, The Vastly Bigger Story Behind the Pimpmobile Jet Bribe”:
… 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…
… [T]his 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.
War for Ukraine Day 1,175: Putin Isn’t Going to Turkey Because He’s a Big (Little) Chicken
Joey Maloney
Repeating from downstairs where it was a complete nonsequitur: I just noticed that this year’s Pets of BJ calendar has two May 25ths.
John Revolta
@Joey Maloney: Frank Oz’s birthday is very important. Some of us celebrate it for two days!
prostratedragon
Behold!
prostratedragon
By the way, welcome back to Late Night, Anne Laurie!
YY_Sima Qian
The PRC can be counted on to be selfish, cynical, opportunistic & amoral, but also predictable & rarely relentlessly hostile or militaristic in its foreign policy:
The PRC will also not care about the Palestinians’ plight more deeply than the predominantly Muslim regional powers.
Sally
He’s walking around the Middle East like some bumpkin in the big city for the first time. Jethro Clampett.
Sally
@YY_Sima Qian: That last sentence! Bullseye!
Sally
Kristal: As to the kingdom over which bin Salman rules, Trump said the United States has “no stronger partner.”
They were right there with us in Iraq, on the WoT, right after 9/11. No stronger partner.
sab
@Sally: Currently, in his addled brain, as President ( aka King) , Trump thinks he is the United States. L’etat c’est moi.
opiejeanne
@Sally: But Jethro was a decent sort.
We’re in Paris for the next 8 days, a pair of obvious tourists, and my broken ankle has mostly stopped hurting but the wrist is taking longer. I want to stay here or in Belgium, and not go home.
opiejeanne
@Sally: Ugh!
sab
@opiejeanne: It’s good to see that you are enjoying your trip even with the accident and injuries.
It has been 50 years since I was in Paris but I assume it is still amazing.
Sally
@opiejeanne: You are correct to point that out – and I retract my heinous slur on Jethro.
Baud
Via reddit, on topic.
JoyceH
@opiejeanne: I still remember the Beverly Hillbillies episode where the Clampetts went to France, and Jethro’s saying upon arrival, “Lafayette, we is here!”
Central Planning
@Joey Maloney: Our Staples calendar has a second January where June should be.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I can’t claim to know how his supporters are taking this trip but I have to imagine some of them are pretty disgusted. He can talk about Venezuelan gangs all he wants but every red blooded conservative knows the Middle East is where the real terrorists come from. The fact that he’s lavishing praise on them and letting them bribe him to sell us all out has to sink in with some of them.
Matt McIrvin
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Well? There seemed to be basically no pushback from Bush being super chummy with the Saudi Arabian royals after 9/11. They gave us a hand with keeping the price of gasoline down.
MagdaInBlack
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: There are some grumblings about the plane, but I fully expect the majority will turn on a dime and support this, because to them, whatever trump does and says is TRUTH.
Baud
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
He went to the middle east during his first term. Admittedly, a plane is a bit more showy than an orb. But I’d be surprised if the plane or this trip is what did him in.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: I’ve pretty much come to believe the only thing that is going to “do him in” is what gets us all in the end.
(I am, for some reason, reluctant to use the D word)
oldster
I love JMM’s calling it the “pimpmobile plane”.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Probably so. The only other thing would be a major economic crash, but he seems to be caving on tariffs.
Matt McIrvin
@MagdaInBlack: I don’t actually give a fuck about Trump getting punished somehow, I just want him and his gang of freaks to go away and leave us some chance to build a half-decent society. When Trump is gone, there IS going to be a reckoning for a lot of the powerful who went all-in with him. The question is just how far in the future that is and how wrecked everything is.
JoyceH
Has NO journalist bothered to go down to Honduras to check on the health of that four year old US citizen cancer patient the Trumpies illegally shipped out of the country? Really?
Princess
@Baud: Yeah, I remember Trump kissing the Orb or whatever in Saudi Arabia the last time he was president. Won’t budge the needle.
The ones who are angry and scared by all this are the Israelis and their friends. No one warned them that everything Trump touches dies. I’m sure the Saudis would like a bigger role in Jerusalem.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Punishment was taken off the table with the election.
And kudos to Trump, he understood how rotten half the people are better than anyone else in the country.
MagdaInBlack
@Matt McIrvin: I’m not particularly interested in seeing him punished either. I just don’t think the faithful are going to turn on him
Eta: recall back when we thought insulting McCain would be IT ? We were all so young and naive then. My rose colored glasses have since been smashed.
Gvg
@MagdaInBlack: they were used to “our” having to deal with unsavory governments to check other unsavory guys. People didn’t support Jimmy Carter, the only one who actually did much about trying to stick to supporting just good guys. PS I don’t think he was that good at it.
What may hurt Trump is hanging out so publicly with almost exclusively super rich AMERICAN rich guys, many of them the unpopular ones who are known for screwing ordinary people and are not popular even with the MAGA. Taxing the rich sentiment has been rising for the last 2 decades. When Bush jr was President it did not poll nearly as well, though it should have. Trump also did not do this in his first term. He was more the outsider and a lot of the rich made it clear they didn’t like him.
Many still don’t, those with taste or real financial knowledge, but opportunists have come out, and also frankly he has caused such crisis that a bunch of the biggest are in damage control fawning that I expect will end up making them even bigger popular targets for a backlash (small violins) the less rich won’t even be offered that chance to save themselves from his terrible economic results though. He is so stupid!
People are weird in their prejudices. So I could be wrong too in what they will react to the most. Also they aren’t all alike.
They Call Me Noni
Makes the days of Kellyanne Conway plugging Ivanka’s cheap shit from the oval office look quaint. This family has absolutely no shame or pride.
mappy!
@Baud: The bravado is loosing it’s edge. The tone has slightly changed. He’s whimpering more. He’s caving on Ukraine, caving on NATO. Someone got in his ear. You can wave Trump Tariff Tax all you want snowflake, but don’t mess with arms sales…
MagdaInBlack
@Gvg: I honestly don’t know any better than the rest of us wtf it would take. I just recall an escalating series of “this is it, this is the thing” that amounted to nothing happening. And here we are.
Driftglass put forth an interesting argument that the whole trump following has gone from a cult to a religion.
YY_Sima Qian
@Princess:
Which is probably why the PRC is cynically & opportunistically shifting its posture wrt Israel.
Baud
@YY_Sima Qian:
Diplomacy
The GameReal LifeBaud
@MagdaInBlack:
Yeah. There are stories on Reddit of people abandoning their children over the MAGA religion.
ColoradoGuy
@MagdaInBlack: I have to agree with Driftglass’ last two YouTube posts. It’s a religion now, and yes, there are clear parallels with Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and the Branch Davidians in Waco. This nihilistic religion is now fully disconnected from anything resembling Reality. They get all their information from the Fox News/OANN fever swamps, and resist anything else.
Matt McIrvin
@Gvg: Any post-Trump move to the left, which I think only happens after Trump dies, is not going to be post-Reagan liberalism as we knew it. That was an adjustment to the broad success of a right-wing order that was economically neoliberal but culturally obnoxious to many. But Trump’s oligarchy is, I think, going to hurt the average person materially.
It might be Communism (though I do think the enthusiasm for that is Very Online; my daughter tells me that she doesn’t see a lot of advocacy for it among the youth IRL). I think it does need to be far more socialist in a broadly construed sense.
The analyses I see of this coming from young people all have the flaw that they think Democrats whiffed this intentionally because they’re greedy corporatists, etc., etc., without acknowledging the role of Gingrich/Hastert/McConnell Republicans in obstructing any big liberal move that could materially benefit Americans through constitutional hardball. But they don’t give a shit; that’s water under the bridge.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: I agree
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Almost half of young people are conservative.
And IMHO young people on the left who spend their time blaming Dems aren’t going to be any more successful than their progressive elders.
But I hope I live long enough to see if I’m right or wrong.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: They don’t seem to really understand that the last time a liberal order actually had sufficient control over the US government to do almost anything it wanted was before *I* was born.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: I’d say reactionary rather than conservative. Margaret Chase Smith was conservative
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t believe in predictions, but I think it’s more likely that a lot of these people, as they grow older, will end up tunnelling to the other prong of the horseshoe rather than usher in a new socialist utopia.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
That’s even worse!
Baud
@Baud:
I would also add, that era wasn’t some utopia for regular folks, even white males.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The most salient political feature of the youth is an absolutely yawning gender gap, the biggest one we’ve ever seen in human history.
The rightward move of young men is often oversold–they’re not actually worse than men my age. But they’re not really better, either. They’re into some horrible shit that is more familiar to me than it should be, but with an Internet flavor.
But the young women, they’ve gone WAY to the left. (And then there are the people who are neither, also a historically large contingent though still really quite small.)
Where this goes, I don’t know. I really doubt that it’s going to be possible to make all those women barefoot broodmares by brute force. But that’s the youth.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m not too surprised. We have this huge voting gap between white voters and non-white voters for largely the same reason.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: It’s almost always the case these days that any young political advocates I see in person doing the work are women. Just yesterday evening, 3 earnest young women from a Virginia environmental group came to the house looking for J to renew her membership and thank her for her support. (She’s still in Spain. I gave them $40, wished them luck, and sent them on their way.)
It strengthens my hopefulness.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I also think the gender gap helps explain some of the “horseshoe left” phenomena: though it’s not all of it, a lot of the seeming left radicals who flip hard right are DUDE left radicals who thought the secret sauce was to dump all the feminist stuff and forge a newly bro-oriented socialism.
If women couldn’t vote, that would be correct.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Once again, just like race. “The working class would unite if they weren’t divided by ‘social issues’ pushed by the elites.”
Lapassionara
@Matt McIrvin: some of the young men I know spend a lot of time on weird web sites that promote alt-right views. They feel like victims, and the web sites evidently give them ammunition to justify those feelings.
Im so old I remember when people were concerned about the influence of television on our politics. Now we have numerous sources of propaganda at our fingertips.
Librettist
@Baud:
That regulatory environment assumed a state of technological and commercial stasis. The arbitrage opportunities became manifest after the war. Big data, improved communications, new highways, jets, etc.
It would take five years to get a ruling on a matter from a regulatory agency, and the courts would not back that decision in any event.
Baud
@Librettist:
Yeah, there’s a left wing nostalgia that’s just as pernicious as the right wing nostalgia.
Matt McIrvin
@Lapassionara: The idea that whites and men and white men were the true victims now, bullied by a liberal activist elite, was omnipresent when I was college-aged; it just spread mostly by word of mouth, sometimes in mainstream media.
lowtechcyclist
@Princess:
I guess he doesn’t touch himself.
:d&r:
Harrison Wesley
@Matt McIrvin: Brocialism?
Mai Naem mobile
@Matt McIrvin: i do want these people punished and it’s not even a vengeance thing. It’s a deterrence. If you keep on letting these people get away with this stuff, they either come back stronger or other people like them come back stronger.
BTW anybody see the pic of the cabinet and Susie Wiles sitting in the green chairs in Saudi Arabia? They all look miserable and it doesn’t look like jetlag. They really look like they’re questioning their life choices.
YY_Sima Qian
Par for the course for the Trump gang, & another sad tale of how a career diplomat can be quickly compromised from serving such an administration:
Quaker in a Basement
I enjoy seeing the word “historic” so egregiously abused. It’s put to work in practically everything posted by the WH these days.