least the 1990s.”43 CBS News calls Trump’s ties to Saudi Arabia “long and deep,” while noting that “he’s often boasted about his business ties with the kingdom.”44 These ties include not just regular hotel and meeting-space bookings but much larger and more lucrative sales as well.45 In 1987, Trump tells an interviewer, “I don’t think anybody sells much more real estate than I do to … the Saudis.… They buy the most expensive apartments in the world, that I happen to build, and I know the people, and I like the people.”46 In 1991, as Trump faces close to a billion-dollar debt attributable to his failed casinos in Atlantic City, a Saudi royal, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, purchases Trump’s 281-foot yacht for $20 million, thereby helping save Trump from a potentially imminent bankruptcy filing.47 Four years later, the same Saudi royal again saves Trump from bankruptcy by taking over Trump’s 51 percent stake in New York’s Plaza Hotel for $328 million—a financial transaction whose immediate result is that “Trump’s creditors forg[i]ve $125 million of his debt.”48 The Associated Press reports that “in 2001, Trump sold the entire 45th floor of the Trump World Tower across from the United Nations in New York for $12 million, the biggest purchase in that building to that point.… The buyer: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”49 And not long after Trump announces his presidential run in June 2015, he registers eight companies with “names tied to the country [Saudi Arabia],” according to the Associated Press, including several mentioning a major Saudi city, Jeddah.50 The same day that he registers four of the companies—August 21, 2015—he tells a crowd at a rally in Alabama, “Saudi Arabia—and I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”51 At another 2015 campaign rally Trump announces, “Saudi Arabia—I like the Saudis. They’re very nice. I make a lot of money with them. They buy all sorts of my stuff. All kinds of toys from Trump. They pay me millions and hundreds of millions.”52 Time notes that “in 2016 business from the Saudis at the Trump hotel in Chicago helped offset losses there from reduced bookings.”53 While Trump’s business ties to the United Arab Emirates are of more recent vintage, they are just as lucrative (see chapters 1, 2, and 9).
Yet by 2018, the year the possibility of Trump-Saudi collusion comes to be discussed by future committee leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives, Trump makes the following statements: “Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with me”; “I don’t make deals with Saudi Arabia”; I don’t have money from Saudi Arabia”; “I have nothing to do with Saudi Arabia”; and “I have no business whatsoever with Saudi Arabia. Couldn’t care less.”54 Closer to the truth is a mid-2018 New York Times article reporting that Trump is “celebrated in the royal courts of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as perhaps the best friend in the White House that their rulers have ever had.”55
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In 1980, a twenty-year-old college dropout by the name of George Nader founds an English-language magazine called International Insight in the basement of his Washington, D.C., apartment.56 Nader, born in Batroun, Lebanon, but transplanted to the United States at the age of fifteen, has spoken English for less than five years, but has wanted to be a journalist since he was twelve.57 The sixteen-page International Insight, with a circulation of 200 and an annual subscription cost of just $10, is produced by Nader and four assistants.58
After renaming the publication Middle East Insight, Nader is, by the late 1980s, featuring interviews with some of the top political figures in the Middle East.59 In 1987, he meets Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini; his write-up of the event will be distributed by five hundred newspapers worldwide.60 Nader’s meeting with Khomeini also underscores his access to powerful figures in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Egypt, as the event is attended by “leaders of the Afghan mujahedin, some senior officials of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, and some Islamic fundamentalists from Egypt.”61 Nader will go on to interview other prominent figures in Middle Eastern and American politics, including President George H. W. Bush, President Bill Clinton (whom he interviews twice), former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah.62 Middle East Insight eventually starts publishing policy forums, monographs, and roundtable discussions focused on hot-button topics from across the Middle East.63