Trump and his allies around the world is broad and deep and still too little known.
What we find when we train this sort of lens on a man like Donald Trump is that his desire to rule has always been co-extensive with his desire to accumulate. Indeed, the fact that, as president, Trump now wants to combine diplomacy with business—even if it threatens America’s national security—is clear. In March 2019, Trump actually complained, according to the New York Times, “that his generals and intelligence agencies don’t consider business and economics in their intelligence analyses.”12 This same perverse attitude was even more vigorously in evidence pre-election, though it took until 2018 for Trump himself to ably summarize it, as he did in telling a press gaggle in November of that year that his ethos as a presidential candidate was this: to make as much money as he could while running, because, as he explained, “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won [the election], in which case I would have gotten back into the [real estate] business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”13 This was a man, remember, who had run for president in part on the idea that he loved America so much he was willing to forgo new wealth to serve it. Like so much else he said, that turned out to be untrue.
Now in the Oval Office, with overwhelming support from a political party he has shattered and rebuilt in his own image, the world Trump and his allies at home and abroad seek to create is a crueler, more dangerous, and more autocratic world than most Americans had ever thought to see a U.S. president endorse. In mid-April 2019, the Egyptian parliament amended Egypt’s constitution to allow its strongman president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to stay in power until 2030—plunging Egypt into autocratic rule for years to come—and Trump lauded el-Sisi, indeed everything from his “97 percent” election victory to his designer shoes.14 More than this, Trump now seeks to declare el-Sisi’s enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization, a move the United States has long resisted because it will wrongly classify even nonmilitants as dangerous radicals.15 As the New York Times has explained, in describing the turmoil surrounding Trump’s policy reversal, “The Pentagon, career national security staff, government lawyers and diplomatic officials have voiced legal and policy objections, and have been scrambling to find a more limited step that would satisfy the White House. As a matter of law, officials have argued that the criteria for designating a terrorist organization are not a good fit for the Muslim Brotherhood, which is less a coherent body than a loose-knit movement with chapters in different countries.… Several political parties in places like Tunisia and Jordan consider themselves Muslim Brotherhood or have ties to it, but eschew violent extremism.”16 The result of Trump’s ill-conceived classification decision is that thousands of peaceful Muslims may now be wrongly characterized as violent killers and hence be subject to drone strikes—though we should, by now, expect nothing less from a president who celebrates his “bromance” with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator who obliterates the bodies of his enemies (while they are still alive) with flamethrowers, wild dogs, mortars, and anti-aircraft guns.17
Just a few days after the Egyptian parliament gave el-Sisi a clear path to stay in power through 2030, Trump issued the second veto of his presidency, blocking Congress’s attempt to end U.S. support for the devastating Saudi-led war in Yemen. The result of Trump’s veto is that America will continue to provide assistance to a war effort that has indiscriminately killed thousands of civilians.18 More recently, Trump has invoked his “emergency powers” to send new missiles and other heavy military equipment to Saudi Arabia—though he knows, as we all do, that these weapons will shortly be carelessly used in areas with large civilian populations, especially now that King Salman, MBS’s father, has publicly absolved his entire army of war crimes with a preemptive royal decree.19
Now reports come from Palestine that the Saudis are trying to bribe Mahmoud Abbas into accepting Trump and Kushner’s cobbled-together “peace deal” by paying the Palestinian president $10 billion—a gambit that underscores how little Trump’s new Sunni allies are committed to justice for the Palestinian people, whom they have long professed to care for.20 According to the Jerusalem Post, King Salman asked Abbas before making his offer, “What is the annual budget of your entourage?” to which Abbas replied, “I’m not a prince