Arabia in May 2017.”175 Reporting on these meetings, Axios will call Nader a “mysterious” and “little-known” Bannon associate “who boasts of his well-placed connections in the Middle East”; the digital media outlet adds that Nader “regularly” visits Bannon in his White House office once Trump is inaugurated.176 Axios will also report, somewhat cryptically, that something about Nader—it is not clear what, or how it is discovered—unsettles Kushner as he begins looking more deeply into the Lebanese American businessman’s background; one possibility is Nader’s history of pedophilia (see Introduction).177 Others whom Axios asks about Nader will draw a blank. According to reporter Jonathan Swan, “A number of well-connected and experienced Middle East hands in Washington told me they’d never heard of Nader. I could only find a few people who have met him. Nobody was quite clear about what he does for a living.”178
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In 2017, Saudi lobbyists will spend more than a quarter of a million dollars reserving rooms at a single Trump property: the Trump International Hotel in D.C.179 The Saudis’ commitment to Trump reflects his commitment to them; as Voice of America will note, “Saudi Arabia is an unprecedented destination for an initial overseas visit by any U.S. president, but the oil-rich nation, which has deep, long-standing energy and defense ties to the United States, was not named in the travel bans” announced by Trump on January 27, 2017.180
Kushner accompanies his father-in-law to Riyadh, as does secretary of state Rex Tillerson, about whom MBZ has begun complaining to the White House, through Elliott Broidy, by May 2017—and whose dismissal Broidy will consequently demand from Trump in a face-to-face meeting 120 days later. In the private conversation the two men have in October 2017, as Broidy reports in an email to Nader immediately thereafter, “President Trump asked me about the job Rex was doing. I responded that he was performing poorly and should be relieved but only at a good time, politically.”181 Broidy’s opposition to Tillerson is based in part on him being, in the view of the Emiratis, “insufficiently hostile to Qatar”—one of the nations whose representatives Trump meets with in May 2017 in Riyadh, when the Saudi-Emirati axis’s blockade of the country is still a few weeks away.182 Reportedly, Tillerson single-handedly prevented a full-scale invasion of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the summer of 2017 (see chapter 6).
At the time of the Trump-Qatari meeting in Riyadh, Qatar is still a member in good standing of the Gulf Cooperation Council alongside Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. The agreement reached on a yacht in the Red Sea in late 2015 had called for the “replace[ment] of the GCC and Arab League” by swapping out Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman in the former council with Egypt, Jordan, and Libya.183 However, given that Libya “was not represented” on the yacht and Jordan “[falls] out dramatically with the group … [when] Saudi Arabia decide[s] that it did not go far enough in enforcing the blockade against Qatar,” the Saudis and Emiratis are in fact, by mid-2017, simply planning on replacing Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman in the GCC with Egypt, while retaining Bahrain.184
MBS, Nader, and Broidy likely oppose Tillerson for another reason as well: his hostility to the ever-increasing role Jared Kushner is playing in Middle East geopolitics, particularly with respect to Saudi Arabia. The Intercept will later report that during this period, “senior U.S. government officials … [are] worried about Kushner’s handling of sensitive foreign policy issues given his lack of diplomatic experience. They have also raised concerns about the possibility that foreign officials might try to influence him through business deals with his family’s real estate empire.”185 According to the Washington Post, two of these “senior U.S. government officials” are secretary of state Rex Tillerson and national security advisor H. R. McMaster, who very “early” in the Trump administration “expressed … concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy.”186 The Post reports that at one point Tillerson angrily asked his staff, in reference to Kushner, “Who is secretary of state here?”187 That Kushner had been involved in meetings with Nader, MBS’s emissary, to discuss Middle East policy, and that Nader was involved in Broidy’s attempts to secure Tillerson’s dismissal in conversations with Trump, underscores that Tillerson’s eventual firing is at least partly the product of systematic coordination by Kushner and his allies, MBS included. That Kushner—and his wife, Ivanka Trump—hold this sort of authority in the White House will be often written of